A San Diego woman who pleaded guilty to embezzling more than $8.5 million from her employer and laundering the money was sentenced Friday to five years and three months in prison.<\/p>\n
Ping \u201cJenny\u201d Gao took money from three aviation investment firms and then \u201cwent on a spending spree\u201d that included buying a $2.9 million home in Point Loma and a $160,000 Porsche, according to the U.S. Attorney\u2019s Office.<\/p>\n
She was later sued by her employer in San Diego Superior Court upon discovery of the theft and prosecutors say her defense case included repeated acts of perjury, in which she claimed the actual owner of the companies was an imposter.<\/p>\n
Gao paid more than $100,000 to people in China to fabricate evidence, pose as the supposed actual owner, and have them claim Gao was helping them reclaim money that had been stolen by people managing the companies in the U.S., prosecutors said.<\/p>\n
Though the judge presiding over the civil trial ordered her not to spend any of the funds until the civil case was resolved, prosecutors say she violated the judge\u2019s order more than 300 times through financial transactions that included wiring $1.6 million to a bank account in Hong Kong.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors wrote in their sentencing papers that Gao sought to steal more than $23 million from her employer but at least $13.7 million of the funds were frozen by the civil judge\u2019s temporary restraining order before Gao could move the money into new bank accounts.<\/p>\n
Gao\u2019s attorney, David Silldorf, alleged in his sentencing papers that while Gao \u201cunderstands what she did was wrong,\u201d the attorney said the conduct arose out of the employer stealing her identity, as well as the identities of Gao\u2019s mother and several other women, as part of a fraud scheme.<\/p>\n
The attorney wrote that the companies\u2019 owners would use their employees\u2019 personalidentifying information to open bank accounts under their names, which were used to \u201cwire millions of dollars from China through these shell companies in the women\u2019s names across the U.S. and to other countries.\u201d<\/p>\n
Assistant U.S. Attorney Patrick Swan rejected that claim in court and said that if the employer was engaged in fraudulent acts, they would not have opened themselves up to scrutiny by suing Gao and contacting the FBI.<\/p>\n
Silldorf also wrote that Gao\u2019s conduct during the civil proceedings was impacted by her attorney, who \u201crepeatedly encouraged her to make poor choices\u201d and \u201ccounseled to engage in conduct that found her in contempt of court during her civil trial.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gao also was ordered to pay $3,295,000 in restitution.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A San Diego woman who pleaded guilty to embezzling more than $8.5 million from her employer and laundering…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":146156,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[1312,138,23,100,74,76,75],"class_list":{"0":"post-177385","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-diego","8":"tag-courts","9":"tag-crime-and-public-safety","10":"tag-local-news","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-san-diego","13":"tag-san-diego-headlines","14":"tag-san-diego-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177385","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177385"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177385\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/146156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}