California Man Sentenced to 16 Months for $3.3M Email Scam

Grimy Times Exclusive

A 47-year-old Inglewood, California, man, Leslie Redd III, has been sentenced to 16 months in prison for his role in a brazen email compromise scheme that stole more than $3.3 million from two boatbuilding companies in the Pacific Northwest.

Redd, 47, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and wire fraud in U.S. District Court in Seattle, Washington. The scheme, which began in October 2018, targeted an engine-building company and a boat-building company, causing significant financial damage and threatening the viability of the businesses.

According to records filed in the case, Redd entered into a scheme with a co-conspirator in Pennsylvania and others. The scheme began when a malicious link was sent to an email address of an employee at the engine-building company. The link allowed the conspirators to gain access to the company’s email system and review various emails, including those transmitting invoices.

The conspirators then posed as a billing executive at the engine manufacturing company and sent the boat-building company instructions to wire the payment funds to a specific bank account. The conspirators had set up a fake company and the account at a Pennsylvania bank specifically to receive these funds. The false emails indicated the engine-building company’s usual bank account was undergoing an audit and said that the engine-building company therefore needed to use a different bank than it had previously.

On October 29, 2018, the boat builder paid the invoice for $3,316,730 by wiring the funds as directed by the fraudulent emails. The co-conspirator in Pennsylvania quickly forwarded $3,074,500 to bank accounts controlled by Redd and other co-conspirators. Of the ill-gotten funds, Redd kept $857,350 in accounts he controlled. Investigators were able to seize $420,817 from those accounts.

Prosecutors described how Redd forwarded more than $2,000,000 of the money that he had received to China to other co-conspirators – people whose names he did not even know. Judge Ricardo S. Martinez expressed particular concern that American citizens would help foreign criminals defraud fellow Americans.

Redd will be on three years of supervised release following prison. He was ordered to pay $2,802,368.24 in restitution (the amount of the outstanding loss).

The case was investigated by the FBI Seattle Office Cyber Task Force. The case was prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorney Andrew Friedman and former Assistant United States Attorney Siddharth Velamoor.

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