Leonardo Ayala was sentenced last week to two years for laundering $5.5 million to Colombia from inside a TD Bank branch. He was not the machine. He was one of the valves the machine kept open for a decade.
A federal contracting program built for service-disabled veterans was allegedly used as a doorway by two companies that did not qualify to walk through it. The DOJ says the door is now closed. The veterans say it was never really open.
Daiwor Woah-Tee ran a tax preparation business in Belcamp, Maryland for nearly seven years. Federal prosecutors say what he actually ran was a pipeline that turned other people's identities into refund checks and pandemic unemployment benefits, $4 million worth, before the pipeline finally showed.
Federal prosecutors say two Chinese nationals managed a compound in Burma where trafficked workers were forced to run cryptocurrency romance scams against Americans. The Justice Department has restrained more than $700 million tied to the network. The victims thought they were talking to someone who cared.
Roody Metelus ran a tax shop in Dania Beach. The government says he turned wage earners into fake sole proprietors and skimmed a percentage off every PPP loan that cleared. He pleaded guilty last week.
Inside a walled facility in rural Burma, trafficked workers sat at laptops and called American retirees pretending to be JPMorgan. The DOJ has now charged the men who built that room and ran it. The room is gone. The machine is not.