Recently in fraud Category

PUSD believes it got shortchanged by contractors doing work on their last big bond measure.

The district turned the results of its investigation over to Pasadena PD, which turned its investigation over to the DA's office, where the case was promptly rejected.

The official reason for the rejection was the tangle of convoluted paperwork associated with the claim. Nate McIntire and Caroline An got the same paperwork, and agree it's a barely dechiperable mess.

In any case, PUSD thinks it can get the DA's office to reopen the case. Here's a snippet of their story, which ran in the Star-News today:

PASADENA - School district officials called on the District Attorney's Office on Monday to reopen an investigation into potential fraud related to school improvement projects.

In an afternoon press conference, Superintendent Edwin Diaz released documents that show two contractors improperly billed the Pasadena Unified School District almost $300,000.

"We're hoping that at least one of these individuals will be charged," Diaz said and added he is urging the school board to begin civil action against the individuals.

District officials also released hundreds of pages of documents they claim support their allegations. The documents included invoices for work never performed and records of payments made to an unlicensed contractor working under the supervision of a district employee.

Officials also released transcripts of conversations with an unlicensed contractor in which the contractor confessed to paying kickbacks to the supervisor.

The documents were given to investigators in March.

In May, prosecutors declined to file any charges after citing poor record keeping and faulty project oversight by the district.

Sandy Gibbons, spokeswoman for Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley, said Monday her office had not received Diaz's letter requesting it revisit the case.

Pardeep Singh has left quite a trail of financial destruction in his wake.

You might remember Singh as the Covina man who rented out his home to several unsuspecting tenants via Craigslist.

Turns out he may have taken a friend for at least $100,000 as well. The friend, Kenneth Yandoli, of Glendale, said he gave Singh $100,000 in return for a deed of trust in the home at 5541 Calera Avenue in Covina.

Then we stumbled upon this great discussion of Singh and his LLC on a couple of websites including the TUG BBS, a group for Timeshare users.

Perhaps the best tidbits of information came from Singh's user profile on eBay. As well as this auction for a nonexistent property near the Las Vegas strip.

We're going to stay on top of this for the rest of the week. I'm still waiting for calls back from eBay, the Las Vegas PD, IC3 and the FBI, no doubt Singh is on all their radar screens.

This is a photo of Pardeep Singh wanted for his role in a Craigslist scam gone bad.

Amanda Baumfeld has been all over this story and plans on filing an update this afternoon. In the meantime here's a snippet of what she wrote for Friday's newspaper:

This is a very well put together scam," said Capt. Joe Hartshorne of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. "The families are truly victims. They could not have seen this coming."

A hold has been placed on Singh's passport and a silver Volvo left in the driveway has been impounded, officials said.

Renters began learning of the apparent fraud Monday night.

The Los Angeles Times didn't touch the story in its print version, but did post a blog entry at LA Now.  The story is accurate, but we're wondering where they got the picture of a "For Rent " sign.

None of the photographers or reporters who actually visited the scene at 5441 Calera Avenue saw a sign quite like that.

This morning reporter Tania Chatila got a call from a woman letting her know detectives were at an El Monte ARCO station investigating a potential stolen credit and debit scam. The scam works by capturing magnetic information from the strip on the back of your card. Here's Tania's dispatch from the field:

In the time I've spent covering fraudulent crime stories, I've built up quite a list of do's and dont's when it comes to credit and debit card use. One of those dont's is the idea that when given the choice, people should use their debit cards as a credit transaction, requiring no pin number, instead of a debit transaction, requiring a pin number. This is to protect from debit card fraud.

But when the criminals are coming up with advanced enough technology to steal your information both ways, what's the point? El Monte Police detectives are investigating at least 15 cases of credit card fraud linked to an Arco Gas station near the El Monte airport. In this case, police believe the suspects used technology that could read both electronic strips on the back of cards and pin numbers.

So either way, the patrons of this popular gas station were doomed.