Two Temecula men who perpetrated a $2.3 million scam that involved sending empty packages via the U.S. Postal Service and insuring them as if they contained valuable contents — then claimed they’d been lost or damaged — pleaded guilty Friday to mail fraud.
Brothers Anwer Fareed Alam, 35, and Yousofazy Fahim Alam, 31, admitted the federal charge under joint plea agreements with the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
The admissions were made during a hearing at U.S. District Court in downtown Los Angeles.
Judge Wesley Hsu scheduled the brothers’ sentencing for Nov. 1. The Alams are facing up to 20 years in federal prison.
They’re both free on bond.
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, from October 2016 to May 2019, the pair filed a series of “fraudulent insurance claims via the USPS’ website and falsely certified that packages (they had sent) contained items of higher value than they did and lied that the packages were lost or had been damaged in transit.”
“Yousofzay Alam also included false invoices, as well as photographs of goods that were not actually inside the parcels,” according to an agency statement. ” The Alam brothers used aliases and fake business names to hide the number of false insurance claims they submitted.”
“Relying on the false information in the fraudulent insurance claim forms, USPS issued checks to the Alam brothers to cover their purported losses up to $100 in value, plus the cost of shipping,” the agency said.
The Postal Service distributed insurance payment checks to the defendants at their homes and more than a dozen post office boxes that they maintained, prosecutors said.
“The brothers then deposited the fraudulently obtained funds into their bank accounts,” according to the government. “The total loss caused to USPS through this scheme was at least $2,367,033.”
The USPS Inspector General’s Office ultimately uncovered the scheme
The men have no documented prior felony convictions in the federal court system, according to records.