SALT LAKE CITY, Utah, Sept. 26, 2022 (Gephardt Daily) — A Spanish Fork man and his businesses have been charged with 13 felonies – nine counts of wire fraud and four counts of money laundering – in alleged shenanigans that include a $1 million bounced check.
In addition, the FBI is asking that anyone concerned about their dealings with James Wolfgramm, 43, call (801) 579-1400, according to a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Utah.
The Department of Justice statement also notes Wolfgramm may have operated under more than one alias -Semisi Niu, and James Vaka Niu.
Two of his businesses, Bitex LLC, and Ohana Capital Financial Inc. (OCF) are named in a federal grand jury indictment handed down last week in Salt Lake City. “Since at least 2018, Wolfgramm represented himself on social media and in private communications as a multimillionaire who made his fortune in cryptocurrency.
Wolfgramm and Bitex collected nearly $1.7 million from two victims by purporting to sell a high-powered cryptocurrency mining machine – the “Bitex Blockbuster” – that did not actually exist, according to the charging documents.
Wolfgramm and Bitex displayed one of these purported machines in Bitex’s office space, connected to a monitor that appeared to display the machine’s real-time mining operations. In reality, the machine was fake, and the monitor displayed a pre-recorded loop that simply gave the appearance of mining activity.
In the final scheme alleged in the indictment, Wolfgramm fraudulently agreed to purchase the Sports City complex and land in Draper for $15 million in 2021.
Wolfgramm took possession of the property and took over billing for all Sports City customers – collecting close to $160,000 – without ever paying any utilities or expenses on the property and without making any of the promised payments to the seller on the sales contract.
As part of the fraud, Wolfgramm gave the Sports City victims a $1 million check that bounced.
Wolfgramm and OCF marketed the business with the motto “Banking the Unbankable” and purported to offer financial services to entities ineligible for traditional bank accounts. According to the indictment, OCF’s websites falsely claimed to have a Board of Advisors and falsely promised that OCF customer funds were bonded.
“Under these pretenses, OCF received millions of dollars from customers who believed their money would be kept on deposit until the customers directed the release of their funds. Instead, Wolfgramm and OCF spent these funds on unrelated business expenses.”
To gain trust with victims, Wolfgramm used images of cryptocurrency wallets holding millions of dollars’ worth of cryptocurrency, a suitcase full of cash, and social media posts of expensive sports cars Wolfgramm claimed to own. “However, some of these images were believed to have been taken from websites and social media feeds of others.”
Arraignment in federal court of Wolfgramm, Bitex, and OCF is pending. Assistant U.S. Attorneys for Utah Aaron Clark and Stewart Young are prosecuting the case.
