United States of America v. Hector Perez

Sacramento, California criminal defense lawyer represented the Defendant charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and aggravated identity theft.

Reported By Kent Morlan

Hector Perez, age 35, of Stockton, California, and his brother Flavio Perez, 30, of Stockton, carried out a fraudulent scheme targeting invoice factoring companies.

Invoice factoring is a financial service that provides immediate cash flow to a business in exchange for the business’s outstanding invoices. The invoice factoring company, which has bought the outstanding invoices, then has the right to collect the money owed by the debtors on those invoices.

To execute the scheme, the brothers created corporate entities posing as businesses seeking to sell fabricated debt in the form of fraudulent invoices. The defendants then sold these fraudulent invoices to at least four different factoring companies. As a result of this deception, the victim factoring companies transferred money to bank accounts held under the control of one or both of the defendants. The victim factoring companies would either never get paid on the fake invoices that they had purchased or if they did, would get paid much less than they were due. If they were paid, the money generally came from the defendants, most often via bank accounts held in the names of fictitious debtors. These payments were designed to disguise the fraud so that the defendants could avoid detection and continue the fraudulent enterprise. From May 2018 through September 2020, the overall loss to the victims totaled more than $2 million.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation conducted the investigation. Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Thuesen is prosecuting the case.

The Defendant elected to plead guilty for his role in a scheme to defraud companies of $2 million.