FILE – People wait on line at a food truck vendor in Manhattan.
Photo by Manuela Morerya
A New Jersey man was indicted for allegedly scamming three food truck vendors out of thousands of dollars, falsely claiming he could give them NYC-issued licenses, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said on Monday.
Mohamed Orabi, 33, of nearby Jersey City, was indicted in New York State Supreme Court on three counts of third-degree grand larceny, a class D felony.
NYC hosts around 23,000 street vendors, many of whom work in Queens and Manhattan. According to the Immigration Research Initiative, around 96% of city street vendors are immigrants. Their home countries included Mexico, Ecuador, Egypt, and Senegal, among others.
NYC lawmakers recently reformed street vending regulations that include removing criminal charges for most vendors. The reform aims to address the legal process for obtaining a street vending license, which is often excessively slow and bureaucratic. The scarcity and delay in issuing licenses have, at least in part, fueled a black market and scams involving illegally sold or transferred permits.
According to court papers, Orabi stole more than $50,000 from at least two food truck vendors and a pushcart vendor by falsely claiming he could lease them city-issued permits. He allegedly told the victims that he could lease the permits held in his name or arrange for them to lease a permit from another vendor.
In exchange, the defendant is said to have demanded thousands of dollars in cash, which the victims handed over to him. Then, he told the victims that they would “receive their permits after their food truck or cart passed a city pre-permit inspection,” according to the DA’s office.
Court documents indicated that Orabi held off issuing “the permits” by making excuses to the victims as to why the inspections had not yet occurred. None of the victims ever received any of Orabi’s fake permits. According to the DA, he did not even have a city-issued permit in his name.
Adding to the brazen scam, prosecutors said, the defendant was able to convince a victim to pay him “thousands of dollars” to get insurance or clear fines that he said the victim “owed to the New York State Workers’ Compensation Board.”
The victim did not owe any fines, the investigation uncovered. Furthering his scam, Orabi demanded the victim give debit card information to pay for purported truck modifications; he then used the information to make $10,000 worth of sports betting charges.
“New Yorkers were building their businesses as food vendors when Mohamed Orabi allegedly took advantage of their limited knowledge of local regulations to scam them out of thousands of dollars,” Bragg said.
He added that the investigation is continuing, and encouraged victims of scams to come forward.
“Please call our office’s Immigration Affairs Unit hotline at 212-335-3600 or via WhatsApp at 347-371-0877,” the DA said. “Interpreters are available to assist non-native English speakers, and we encourage all to reach out regardless of immigration status.”