LAUDERHILL, Fla. — A Lauderhill man named Stravinsky Vincent could end up facing the music after police said he was involved in a seven-figure, multi-state fraud scheme.
An arrest report states that Vincent, 18, has a day job working at Five Guys. Police said he admitted to working with three guys ― “Mitch, Mark and Squid” ― as part of the scheme and personally pocketed more than $200,000 from fraudulent payments.
The report describes the fraud as part of a “social engineering” scheme using trickery to obtain critical information from victims that gave the scammers access to their bank accounts, allowing them to wire payments from the victims’ accounts to theirs.
Police said in one case, a woman from rural Delta, Alabama told investigators that she received a message from what she thought was Truist Bank warning her about a $2,000 fraudulent transaction. She then spoke to what she thought was the “fraud department,” who told her to remove $20,000 from her account and deposit it in an account set up for her.
She was only able to deposit a little less than $17,000, which police said went into a Wells Fargo account controlled by Vincent. Authorities said she went back to deposit another $20,000 “when it dawned on her that she was the victim of a scam.”
Police said other victims included a construction company in Niles, Michigan, which lost more than $250,000; a truck parts distributor in suburban St. Louis, which lost more than $304,000; and a law firm outside of Dallas, which lost more than $1.2 million.
Investigators said they spoke with Vincent at his home in May, where he confessed to working with the aforementioned trio ― none of whom were identified in the report ― “in what was essentially a scheme to defraud persons or companies out of their funds.”
“There was an agreement that he would open and use his account to receive the illicit funds in exchange for some form of reward from the proceeds,” LPD Detective Richard Clarke wrote in the report. “When the acquired funds were deposited to his account(s), (they) would be collected mainly by Mitch, who would transport him to various ATMs for the withdrawal of cash using his debit card.”
Vincent, Clarke wrote, “added that he had other accounts that were also closed due to suspected fraud.”
Vincent self-surrendered to LPD on Tuesday, the report states.
He faces six grand theft charges. Jail records indicate that a judge found no probable cause for four additional grand theft charges or charges of organized scheme to defraud and money laundering.
As of Friday, he remained in the Broward Main Jail on a $195,000 bond.
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