Information for Victims in Large Cases
United States v. Chirag Choksi et al.
Conspirators at an Indian call center used automated, previously recorded calls, commonly referred to as “robocalls,” to initiate contact with victims. These robocalls usually contained messages designed to create a sense of urgency with the call recipient, including threats of serious legal problems, usually criminal in nature, that required immediate action in order to avoid drastic consequences, including arrest and/or significant financial penalties. Victims would be instructed to stay on the line or to call a particular number. Eventually victims would speak with one or more live persons, who used a variety of scripts incorporating different fraud schemes to persuade victims to send money via wire money transfer and/or the mail or private interstate commercial carrier shipments.
United States v. Javaid Perwaiz, 2:19cr189
As alleged in the indictment and court documents, from at least January 2010 until November 8, 2019, Perwaiz was a licensed physician, board certified to practice obstetrics and gynecology. He was a solo practitioner and operated two different offices in Chesapeake, Virginia. At the time of his arrest, it is estimated he had well over 1,000 active patients. Throughout this time period, Perwaiz submitted tens of thousands of fraudulent claims to various health care benefit programs for unnecessary, uninformed, and/or fraudulent gynecological procedures. As part of his scheme and to justify his bills, Perwaiz would falsely claim that patients asked for the billed procedures/surgeries, falsify symptoms and complaints supposedly made by the patients, and falsely claim to perform diagnostic procedures, among other conduct.
The public is reminded that a criminal indictment contains only charges and is not evidence of guilt. The defendant is presumed innocent and is entitled to a fair trial at which the government has the burden of proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
United States v. Aleksii Burkov, 15-cr-245
From approximately 2011-2013, Burkov, a national and resident of Russia, ran a website called Card Planet that sold stolen credit card information on a massive scale. The U.S. Secret Service obtained a copy of the back-end server hosting Card Planet and determined that over 150,000 stolen credit card numbers were offered for sale on the site. The numbers appear to have been issued by over 1300 banks. Burkov was arrested while vacationing in Israel in 2015 and extradited to the United States in 2019. The USSS was not able to seize any assets from Burkov and he is likely to be deported to Russia upon serving his sentence.
United States v. Kristopher Lee Dallmann et al.
Eight individuals, including Kristopher Lee Dallmann and Darryl Julius Polo, have been charged with conspiring to violate federal criminal copyright law by running an entity called Jetflicks, an online, subscription-based service headquartered in Las Vegas, Nevada, that permitted users to stream and, at times, download copyrighted television programs without the permission of the relevant copyright owners. According to the indictment, the defendants reproduced tens of thousands of copyrighted television episodes without authorization and made these infringing programs available to tens of thousands of paid subscribers located throughout the U.S. At one point, Jetflicks claimed to have more than 183,200 different television episodes. One of the defendants, Polo, left Jetflicks and created a competing site based in Las Vegas called iStreamItAll (ISIA) that at one point claimed to have 118,479 different television episodes and 10,980 individual movies. Like Jetflicks, ISIA offered content for a regular subscription fee to viewers around the United States, and ISIA publicly asserted that it had more content than Netflix, Hulu, Vudu and Amazon Prime. In addition, the two services were not only available to subscribers over the internet but specifically designed to work on many different types of devices, platforms and software including numerous varieties of computer operating systems, smartphones, tablets, smart televisions, video game consoles, digital media players, set-top boxes and web browsers.
Both Jetflicks and ISIA allegedly obtained infringing works from pirate websites around the world—including some of the globe’s biggest torrent and Usenet sites specializing in unauthorized content such as The Pirate Bay, RARBG, and TorrentDay—using automated computer scripts to locate, download, process, and store the illegal files, and then quickly make that content available on servers in Canada to United States subscribers for streaming and/or downloading. Essentially, Jetflicks and ISIA were two of the largest streaming services in the United States but did not compensate copyright owners for streaming and making available for download the unauthorized works they offered to their paid subscribers.
Besides the conspiracy charge, Dallmann has been charged with additional counts of criminal copyright infringement as well as money laundering in connection with Jetflicks, and Polo faces similar additional charges in connection with ISIA. More information can be found in the DOJ press release.