Eleven people were arrested for stealing elderly people’s identities then use the information to get loans in Southern California, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced Thursday.<\/p>\n
Federal authorities said the suspects first used victim’s personal information to get their hands on title reports for the victim’s homes. Then using the elderly victim’s properties as collateral, the suspects tried to obtain or successfully received loans, the DOJ alleged.<\/p>\n
The suspects are also accused of fabricating a number of financial documents, such as bank statements, rental agreements, doctor’s notes and death certificates. They also managed to get them fraudulently notarized, federal authorities said.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur agents traced every wire, every transfer, and every shell account to expose the financial backbone of this conspiracy,” said Tyler Hatcher, Special Agent in Charge, IRS-CI Los Angeles Field Office.<\/p>\n
The victims’ properties are located in Santa monica, Hollywood, Hollywood Hills, Westwood and Chinatown.<\/p>\n
The suspects are believed to have taken about $6 million from their victims after trying to steal $17.4 million from them, the DOJ said.<\/p>\n
The suspects were arrested Thursday morning and set to be arraigned in federal court.<\/p>\n
Nazaret Chakrian, 65, a.k.a. \u201cNiko,\u201d of Hollywood<\/p>\n
Arnold Moradians, 57, a.k.a. \u201cJulian,\u201d of Hollywood. Moradians is an Iranian national who has an outstanding warrant for removal from the United States, the DOJ said.<\/p>\n
Avetis Hekimyan, 38, a.k.a. \u201cChef Avo,\u201d of North Hollywood<\/p>\n
Ross Tarkhan, 32, of Glendale<\/p>\n
Tigran Hovanesian, 56, of Glendale<\/p>\n
Armen Vardevaryan, 55, a.k.a. \u201cGonch,\u201d of North Hollywood<\/p>\n
Craig Higdon, 66, of Naples, Florida<\/p>\n
Helen Spangler, 62, of Oakdale, California<\/p>\n
Victor Lossi, 43, of Thousand Oaks<\/p>\n
Marine Sarkisian, 49, of Hollywood<\/p>\n
Cynthia Borjas, 51, of Koreatown<\/p>\n
The suspects are facing the charges of wire fraud, identity theft, money laundering and others.<\/p>\n
If convicted, the defendants would face a statutory maximum sentence of 20 years in federal prison for each fraud- and money laundering-related count, and a mandatory consecutive sentence of two years in federal prison for the aggravated identity theft count, according to the DOJ.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Eleven people were arrested for stealing elderly people’s identities then use the information to get loans in Southern…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":227423,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[7045,13074,48,52,51,47,50,49],"class_list":["post-227422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-department-of-justice","tag-fraud-false-statements","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227422","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=227422"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227422\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/227423"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=227422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=227422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=227422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}