At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the economy was driven to a near-standstill, many of the side effect predictions made by professional and common-sense economists were proven true: scalpers shifted their focus from concert tickets to hand sanitizers, and prices skyrocketed in accordance with the dollar amount of the first CARES Act disbursement.
While many of these scams targeted the public at large, scammers also turned their sights to those sources that would naturally be on the spot as the result of demand, like medical equipment manufacturers, research suppliers and other players in the life sciences industry.
Prison Phone Scam Picks On AbbVie
November 2021 saw the sentencing of a Georgia prison inmate for a fraudulent resell setup he started in 2019 by posing as a representative of biopharmaceutical company AbbVie under the alias ‘Morgan Sylvia’. Using a number of contraband cell phones and some guile, Damon Thomas Young covertly placed orders for an assortment of heavy machinery and construction equipment for the fictitious founding of a new manufacturing facility in rural Georgia.
“Calling this far-reaching fraud scheme brazen is probably an understatement,” federal prosecutors wrote of the scam in a court filing. While only about $500,000 worth of equipment was actually obtained through the operation and eventually recovered, the grand total of all the fraudulent orders amounted to approximately $2.8 million.
Equipment included…
