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SALT LAKE CITY — A federal judge sentenced a California man to a year in prison for a multimillion-dollar telemarketing scheme.
Charles Robert Brewer, aka "Robert Brewer" or "Scott Brewer," 59, of Manhattan Beach, California, participated in a telemarketing conspiracy between June 2016 and February 2017, according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney's Office in the District of Utah.
Brewer is the last of six co-conspirators to be sentenced for selling fraudulent products such as "Amazon rooms and accompanying advertising," "government grants," and "business opportunities." The scheme occurred in several states including Utah, though the statement did not specify the total of the "millions of dollars of losses" or the specifics of where the losses were incurred.
Brewer admitted to conspiring to commit wire fraud, the statement said. He was sentenced to 12 months and one day of imprisonment, 24 months of supervised release, and ordered by the court to pay $48,639.86 in restitution.
Brewer processed payments "quickly so that he and his co-conspirators could process the victims' credit card transactions through merchant accounts and then transfer the victims' money to safe accounts before the victims realized they had been defrauded and thereby demand refunds, and before the credit card companies recognized the fraud and shut down the merchant accounts," the U.S. Attorney's Office statement said.
The statement said Brewer helped recruit "nominees" who he used to set up merchant accounts to run the fraudulent transactions, but the nominees were unaware of the fraud occurring. He also fabricated financial documents and bank statements to trick credit card companies into setting up merchant accounts.
Brewer and his co-conspirators deceived auditors by pretending to be satisfied customers, the U.S. Attorney's Office said. Brewer also impersonated a merchant account owner in order to make excuses to payment processors whenever credit card companies became suspicious of high numbers of chargebacks.
The Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation worked with the FBI Salt Lake City Field Office to investigate the case.
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Cassidy Wixom
