{"id":472167,"date":"2026-09-22T18:40:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-22T18:40:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/472167\/"},"modified":"2026-09-22T18:40:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-22T18:40:09","slug":"five-fresno-residents-plead-guilty-to-1-million-bank-fraud-scheme","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/472167\/","title":{"rendered":"Five Fresno residents plead guilty to $1 million bank fraud scheme"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Five Fresno residents pleaded guilty in federal court to participating in a bank fraud scheme that they organized on Facebook.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The fraud scheme lasted one year and sought to defraud banks out of $1 million.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The big picture: The five defendants are Zorian Temple, 25, Davonntae Barfield, 31, Zion Brewer, 40, Nyric Hinton, 28, and Harry Cooper Neal, 30.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Temple pleaded guilty to bank fraud on Monday. Barfield, Brewer and Hinton pleaded guilty on Aug. 17, followed by Neal on Aug. 31.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Driving the news: Brewer was a U.S. Postal Service employee who stole checks from the mail and gave them to the other defendants from 2022 to 2023.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The other defendants recruited bank account holders or used their own bank accounts to deposit the stolen checks and withdraw the proceeds.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>They met each other and coordinated the scheme primarily through Facebook and Facebook MEssenger.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">By the numbers: The stolen checks had a face value of more than $1 million, but the actual loss to the banks was a few hundred thousand dollars due to stopped payments.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">What we\u2019re watching: Neal is scheduled to be sentenced on Nov. 30. Barfield, Brewer and Hinton will be sentenced on Dec. 7, and Temple will be sentenced on Jan. 11.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>They face up to 30 years in prison and a fine of up to $1 million.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Five Fresno residents pleaded guilty in federal court to participating in a bank fraud scheme that they organized&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":472168,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[112,114,113],"class_list":["post-472167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-fresno","tag-fresno","tag-fresno-headlines","tag-fresno-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/472167","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=472167"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/472167\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/472168"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=472167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=472167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=472167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}