SALT LAKE CITY, Utah, Aug. 3, 2023 (Gephardt Daily) — A California man was sentenced to a year and a day of imprisonment in Utah and ordered to pay over $48,000 in restitution for a telemarketing scam.
Charles Robert Brewer, aka “Robert Brewer” or “Scott Brewer,” 59, of Manhattan Beach, California, is the last of six co-conspirators to be sentenced in the fraud that spanned several states, according to Thursday’s press release from U.S. Attorney for Utah Trina A. Higgins on his sentencing.
Brewer admitted to conspiracy to commit wire fraud in participating in a telemarketing scheme that sold fraudulent products to the public, the release said, including but not limited to, “Amazon rooms and accompanying advertising,” “government grants,” and “business opportunities.”
The scheme carried out in “telemarketing rooms” caused millions of dollars in losses between June 2016 to February 2017.
The case was investigated jointly by the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) unit and the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Salt Lake City Field Office.
“In furtherance of the conspiracy, Brewer processed payments quickly so that he and his co-conspirators could process the victims’ credit card transactions through merchant accounts and then transfer the victims’ money to safe accounts.” This was done, according to the release, before the victims realized they had been defrauded and would thereby demand refunds, and before the credit card companies recognized the fraud and shut down the merchant accounts.
Additionally, Thursday’s release said in describing the complicated machinations, Brewer helped recruit “nominees,” — persons whom he used to set up the merchant accounts to run the fraudulent transactions through without the nominees’ knowledge of the fraud.
Brewer helped fabricate fraudulent financial documents and bank statements to trick credit card companies into setting up the merchant accounts. Brewer helped his co-conspirators impersonate satisfied customers to deceive auditors.
Brewer also personally sent emails to a payment processor, impersonating a merchant account owner to make fraudulent excuses for the high number of chargebacks in order to keep the merchant accounts open after the credit card companies became suspicious.
