United States v. Shuklin et al.

A grand jury charged the defendants with participating in a criminal enterprise that operated thirteen different moving companies in multiple locations through the United States. The criminal enterprise enriched itself by defrauding, extorting, and stealing from customers who hired the moving companies to move their household goods. Specifically, the criminal enterprise lied to customers about the company's experience and record, provided low binding estimates to secure moving jobs, loaded the customers' household goods into moving trucks, and then illegally demanded money above the binding estimate based on fraudulent calculations of space used by the goods. Customers were required to pay falsely inflated prices to retrieve their possessions and, in some cases, never received their possessions at all. The criminal enterprise protected and perpetuated itself by concealing and misrepresenting the owners, operators, employees, and operations of their moving companies. This fraud was accomplished through a number of different means, including the preparation and submission to federal regulators and to third-party companies of documents containing false information and the use of fake drivers' licenses for the purported owners of the moving companies to further the criminal enterprise.