A Bakersfield man faces several years in prison for running an illegal money transmitting business.\u00a0<\/p>\n
U.S. Attorney Eric Grant announced Monday that Ifeanyi Emmanuel Ugwu, 49, pleaded guilty to opening an unlicensed money transmitting business involving more than $5 million in illegally obtained funds.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The big picture: Ugwu owned, operated and served as Chief Executive Officer of Franklin Finance Inc. from December 2020 to August 2023.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The business opened and controlled 20 bank accounts across nine banks and financial institutions. Ugqu received around $5 million from more than 100 people in the U.S. in those accounts. He transferred those funds to people in China, Nigeria and other countries.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Several of the recipients of the money sent by Ugwu were victims of cybercrimes and fraud.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He received and transferred around $580,000 in fraud proceeds from those victims.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ugwu was able to operate his illegal business by making misrepresentations to people, banks and other financial institutions to conceal his fraudulent activity.\u00a0<\/p>\n
What we\u2019re watching: Ugwu is scheduled to be sentenced by U.S. District Judge Jennifer Thurston on July 27.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He faces a maximum of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Bakersfield man faces several years in prison for running an illegal money transmitting business.\u00a0 U.S. Attorney Eric…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":85768,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[151,153,152],"class_list":["post-264723","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-bakersfield","tag-bakersfield","tag-bakersfield-headlines","tag-bakersfield-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264723","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=264723"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264723\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/85768"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=264723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=264723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=264723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}