Misrepresentation when money or other tangible things are at stake is fraud. There are civil frauds and criminal frauds.
Say you needed to have a room added to your home. You approach a contractor, who talks about his past experience, and offers up several customer and trade references to corroborate this experience. You sign a contract, pay the 50% deposit, and the person disappears and doesn’t respond to your inquiries, nor those of the police.
You later find out that the customers were family members of the contractor, the trade reference was a Delaware corporation owned by the same Nevada corporation that cashed your check. In other words, the entire enterprise was a criminal enterprise constructed to defraud customers, not deliver.
That contrived example is an obvious series of frauds that is obviously a criminal enterprise. It’s easy to understand because the money was stolen. A case like this is a little different because the fraud was basically a scheme to get a constrained resource by lying about material facts to commit the fraud. IANAL, but my guess is the deliberate construction of these legal entities with no meaningful purpose elevated the matter.
Say you needed to have a room added to your home. You approach a contractor, who talks about his past experience, and offers up several customer and trade references to corroborate this experience. You sign a contract, pay the 50% deposit, and the person disappears and doesn’t respond to your inquiries, nor those of the police.
You later find out that the customers were family members of the contractor, the trade reference was a Delaware corporation owned by the same Nevada corporation that cashed your check. In other words, the entire enterprise was a criminal enterprise constructed to defraud customers, not deliver.
That contrived example is an obvious series of frauds that is obviously a criminal enterprise. It’s easy to understand because the money was stolen. A case like this is a little different because the fraud was basically a scheme to get a constrained resource by lying about material facts to commit the fraud. IANAL, but my guess is the deliberate construction of these legal entities with no meaningful purpose elevated the matter.