Archive for October, 2009

US fraudsters held for taking advantage of Guyanese, Haitians

NEW YORK, United States, October 19, 2009 – American officials have cracked down on two separate scams that sought to take advantage of nationals of Guyana and Haiti.

In one case, several Guyanese migrants in New York now face deportation after falling prey to a Puerto Rican man posing as an immigration attorney.

The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office in New York says Wilmer Rivera Melendez promised to get at least 14 Guyanese nationals in Brooklyn green cards in the US. He is accused of taking up to US$75,000 from the undocumented migrants as an employee of W&R Immigration Services, purportedly a non-profit organisation located in Covington, Georgia.

Melendez allegedly took the migrants money and filed false paper work with the US Immigration and Citizenship Services agency. Based on the fake filings, the migrants now face deportation from the US.

The 60-year-old is now being held on US$175,000 bail after pleading not guilty to charges including grand larceny, scheme to defraud and falsely appearing as an attorney. He faces a maximum of four years in jail.

In the other matter, three South Florida residents have been charged by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) with conducting a Ponzi scheme that collected at least US$14.3 million from hundreds of Haitian-American investors residing in South Florida and New Jersey.

The SEC alleges that Ronnie Eugene Bass Jr, Abner Alabre, Brian Taglieri and their companies, HomePals Investment Club LLC and HomePals LLC (HomePals), conducted the scheme from April 2008 to December 2008 by selling unsecured notes and promising to double investors’ money every 90 days.

Bass apparently claimed he could generate such spectacular returns through his purported expertise in trading stock options and commodities. However, he only traded approximately US$1.2 million of the US$14.3 million raised and generated trading losses of 19 per cent.

HomePals allegedly used the bulk of the investor funds to repay earlier investors in typical Ponzi scheme fashion, and Bass, Alabre and Taglieri misappropriated at least US$668,000 of investor funds for personal use, according to the SEC.

The three men face charges of securities fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud, wire fraud and money laundering, similar to what Sir Allen Stanford faces as he awaits trial for an alleged multi-billion dollar Ponzi scheme conducted through the Antigua-based Stanford International Bank