PHILADELPHIA
The 76-year-old owner and operator of a payment processing company was charged with withdrawing millions of dollars from consumers’ bank accounts.
Neil Godfrey, 76, of Santa Ana, California, was charged with one count of wire fraud. Godfrey owned and operated Check Site Inc., based in Santa Ana, California.
Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Benjamin C. Mizer of the Justice Department’s Civil Division said, “Neil Godfrey used his understanding of the banking system to help his partners in crime steal money from hard-working, often low-income Americans.”
Adding, “The amounts that were illegally withdrawn generally did not exceed a few hundred dollars per victim, but the scheme was so massive and went on so long that altogether it added up to millions of dollars in fraudulent withdrawals. As this prosecution demonstrates, the Department of Justice will continue to prosecute individuals and corporations involved in this kind of fraud.”
According to the information, there are the allegations against Godfrey:
Between 2006 and 2010, Check Site enabled fraudulent merchants to withdraw money from consumers’ bank accounts without the consumers’ knowledge or consent.
Godfrey allegedly worked with at least two fraudulent merchants who operated websites that purportedly offered payday loans. It is alleged that the websites were simply a ruse to harvest consumers’ bank account information.
Instead of providing consumers with payday loans, the merchants operating the websites used the information provided by the consumers in loan applications to withdraw money from the consumers’ bank accounts.
It is alleged that using Check Site, Godfrey knowingly processed the merchants’ fraudulent withdrawals and provided the merchants access to the banking system.
Also Godfrey was an expert in finding banks that were willing to facilitate these transactions and ignore the red flags raised by these transactions.
Such banks included one located in Irvine, California, and one located in Philadelphia.
Godfrey allegedly helped the fraudulent merchants stay off the radar of other banks and regulators so that the fraud could continue.
For example, Godfrey allegedly advised merchants how to change the names of their companies and set up the facade of a legitimate company to defeat banks’ attempts at due diligence.
In an e-mail message quoted in the information: Godfrey advised a fraudulent merchant that “the lesson we have learned is that we must trick the [bank] folk. It means you need to set up some type of website front. What we need to do is set up a legitimate website selling anything you can think of—that is what you get approved on. It is irrelevant if anything is ever sold there—just so it exists. . . . In the mean time we set up false credit card approval etcetera. It is this we use to run the transactions. Yes, there will be a lot of returns, but what we do is send through transactions over the next few weeks that don’t have high returns. They stop looking and then we can run the regular stuff. . . . [A]fter several months we junk that company and go to another company.”