FLORIDA – A federal grand jury in Miami, Florida, indicted two people and two corporations for allegedly operating call centers in Peru that lied to and threatened Spanish-speaking victims into paying fraudulent settlements.
The indictment alleges that a phone room in Miami collected the fees.
The two – Maria Luzula, of Miami, and Juan Alejandro Rodriguez Cuya, of Lima, Peru – were charged with conspiracy, mail and wire fraud and extortion. Two Miami-based corporate entities – Angeluz Florida Corporation and Angeluz Miami, LLC – were charged with the same offenses, authorities said.
Luzula and Rodriguez Cuya were originally charged by criminal complaint and arrested on Jan. 10, 2013. They have remained incarcerated since their arrests.
The defendants’ employees in Peru, using Internet-based telephone calls, lied to Spanish-speaking victims in the U.S. about fines they owed and lawsuits that would be brought against the victims, officials said.
Officials said Peruvian callers threatened the victims and falsely told each victim that he or she had wrongfully failed to receive a delivery of products. The callers went on to claim, again falsely, that the victims owed thousands of dollars in fines. In reality, the victims had never ordered these products and no attempts to deliver products to the victims had been made, according to officials.
The indictment alleges that Luzula’s and Rodriguez Cuya’s employees claimed that the consumers could resolve the fines if they immediately paid a “settlement fee.”
Consumers who contested these settlement fees were told that failure to pay could lead to arrest, deportation, forfeiture of property or harm to their credit scores, officials said.
Although consumers typically objected that they did not order or refuse delivery of any products, thousands still agreed to pay the fees due to these threats, authorities said.
“Consumer fraud that targets a specific population is shameful,” said U.S. Attorney Wilfredo Ferrer. “In this case, the defendants are alleged to have targeted Spanish-speaking consumers and falsely threatened them with arrest, deportation, forfeiture of property or harm to their credit scores when the consumers refused to settle claims for products that were not delivered or ordered. Such tactics are intolerable. The U.S. Attorney’s Office is committed and stands united with the Department of Justice’s Civil Division, Consumer Protection Branch, to protect our consumers from fraud.”
Luzula and Rodriguez Cuya are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.