A man has been convicted of several crimes after being caught in a scheme to defraud the US government of $13 million.
Carl Delano Torjagbo, a resident of Georgia, is being convicted of bank fraud, wire fraud and money laundering after obtaining a fraudulent $9.6 million Payment Protection Plan (PPP) loan and filing fraudulent tax returns that generated $3.4 million in Internal Revenue Service (IRS) refunds.
-->Federal prosecutors say that Torjagbo submitted two different tax returns to the IRS in February of 2021 while using different Social Security numbers and dates of birth and claiming that he had suffered millions of dollars in losses to offset earnings from a supposed African gold mining business.
The tax returns resulted in a Treasury check being issued to Torjagbo for $3,366,240. Prosecutors say that days later, he filed for a PPP loan for $9.6 million.
Theodore Hertzberg, the US Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, says that Torjagbo had listed 493 fake employees for his company called Kremkov Industries who supposedly lived in the US but worked in a mine in Ghana, and many of the employees had fake names like “Keanu Reeves,” “Gene Hackman,” “Oliver Twist” and “Jon Snow,” reports FOX 5 Atlanta.
“This was really a notorious fraud. It’s horribly offensive that this was money meant to help struggling Americans, and it was wasted and abused by this criminal.”
Prosecutors say that Torjagbo splurged the money on his own personal indulgences, including $1,677,861.01 for his personal residence, $332,999.80 for a 2014 Lamborghini Aventador, $120,799.79 for a 2022 BMW M850xi, $90,520 for a 2021 Land Rover Range Rover Velar, $51,000 for the down payment on a 72-foot yacht, over $1,000,000 for real estate, trucks, and trailers to start a new business and more than $15,000 for plastic surgery.
Torjagbo’s sentencing is scheduled for November 3rd and could result in a maximum sentence of 170 years in prison.
