A Singapore resident has been handed a 57-month prison sentence for his role in a brazen pre-IPO stock scheme that swindled millions from unsuspecting investors.
Shamoon Rafiq, a/k/a ‘Shamoon Omer Rafiq,’ a/k/a ‘Omar Rafiq,’ a/k/a ‘Omer Rafiq,’ 41, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero for his part in the elaborate scheme to defraud investors out of millions of dollars.
Rafiq, who was born in the Netherlands and resided in Singapore, was previously convicted in 2004 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York for carrying out a wire fraud scheme involving pre-IPO stock.
After serving a 41-month federal prison sentence for that crime, Rafiq was deported from the U.S. and eventually relocated to Singapore, where he hatched a new scheme in or about 2020 to defraud victims into paying him millions of dollars for alleged investment interests in various pre-IPO stocks that he did not actually own or control.
In connection with his new fraud scheme, Rafiq impersonated two senior officials of a prominent family office investment firm, FamCap, and created a fake FamCap website and email addresses for Victim-1 and Victim-2 without their consent.
The scheme came to light when an investment firm based in New York and one of its foreign institutional clients were deceived into making an agreement to wire $9 million in mid-August 2020 into an escrow account in New York for anticipated release to a bank account in Singapore to pay Rafiq for his purported sale of investment interests in the LLC.
U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said, ‘Today’s sentence demonstrates that stiff penalties await anyone who seeks to cheat and swindle American investors, and that running an investment scheme from halfway around the world will not shield fraudsters from being pursued by this Office and our law enforcement partners.’
Rafiq pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit securities fraud and wire fraud before U.S. Magistrate Judge Sarah L. Cave.
The charges against Rafiq allege that he falsely claimed the LLC was managed by FamCap and that it owned pre-IPO shares of Airbnb, Inc., when in fact the LLC never existed and did not own such stock.
Rafiq’s sentence marks the culmination of a long and complex investigation into the scheme, which was pursued by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York and its law enforcement partners.
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Key Facts
- State: New York
- Agency: DOJ USAO
- Category: Fraud & Financial Crimes
- Source: Official Source ↗
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