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Online fraud these days is getting out of hand. DOJ continues to crack down on online scammers that use sites like eBay and Amazon to lure in customers with promises of products, but deliver nothing at all. In this case, a Romanian guy is facing jail time after participating in a scheme to scam the public.
On Friday, a federal judge in Tennessee sentenced a Romanian man by the name Vlad Diaconu, 37, to 29 months in prison after he participated in a scheme to defraud Americans out of $870,000 on products that never even existed (via Ars Technica).
Diaconu of Bucharest, Romania, pleaded guilty to fraud earlier this year in March. He admitted to listing nonexistent cars on eBay and other websites to scam buyers. He and his partners would attract buyers to put up money into an escrow account for the nonexistent car, and was an account that as controlled by the scammers. Diaconu would then transfer that money from the account to European bank accounts.
Prior to this sentencing, Diaconu’s lawyer asked that his client be give only 25 months in prison by saying that he had suffered enough already. Diaconu was also detained in Romanian jail cell for over three months.
