Nationwide ring of elder scammers targeted Missourians

Kevin S. Held
·2 min read
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ST. LOUIS – Three people from California appeared in federal court last week to be charged as part of a nationwide conspiracy to scam elderly people out of their money.

Prosecutors with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Missouri said the recent charges come as an expansion of a St. Louis case.

On May 8, Bowen Chen, 21, Jiacheng Chen, 19, and Vianne Chen (aka Tingtin Chen), 41, were indicted on charges including conspiracy to commit mail, bank, and wire fraud. Four others are already facing the same charges: Liang Jin, 24, Tsz Yin Kan, 41, Kaiyu Wen, 25, and Yu-Chieh Huang, 22.

According to the indictment, Kan established USA You Yi Sheng Inc. as a California-based education service business. Kan produced fake immigration papers and, with the help of Vianne Chen, opened student checking accounts using those fake papers and Taiwanese passports that had been shipped to him. Other co-conspirators were involved in opening accounts.

Couriers, including Bowen and Jiacheng Chen, took the cash collected from their victims, converted them into cashier’s checks, and deposited them into a separate account. Prosecutors claim that account received more than $7 million.

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Last August, an elderly Missouri couple received a pop-up ad indicating their computer was infected with a virus. The couple was told someone had accessed child pornography through their computer. The scammers told the couple they could avoid prosecution by paying them $88,000. The couple gathered the money but had second thoughts and contacted police, who later arrested Yu-Chieh Huang.

The indictments come as part of the Department of Homeland Security’s annual Money Mule Initiative to identify and prosecute those who defraud elderly victims via lottery fraud, tech support fraud, romance scams, and grandparent scams and use money mules to send those funds to international recipients.

If you or someone you know is 60 or older and experienced financial fraud, you can contact the U.S. Justice Department’s National Elder Fraud Hotline at 1-833-FRAUD-11. The hotline is open Monday through Friday, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Eastern. Complaints can also be made to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) by calling 877-FTC-HELP or online through the FTC’s Complaint Assistant.

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