In a scheme that fleeced the U.S. Postal Service out of a hefty $2.3 million, two brothers from Riverside County, Anwer Fareed Alam, and Yousofzay Fahim Alam, have admitted to masterminding a fraudulent Priority Mail insurance scam, prosecutors said.
The Alam siblings, aged 35 and 31, each owned up to one count of mail fraud involving thousands of bogus insurance claims, stretching from October 2016 to May 2019 they wrapped empty packages or those with little value and sent them to nonexistent addresses, later claiming they held valuable contents that were either lost or damaged, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
The Alams took advantage of the standard $100 insurance provided on Priority Mail items by USPS; their plot involved mailing parcels to fictional recipients and using aliases along with fake business names to submit inflated insurance claims, while disguising their tracks, they used several addresses including their homes, business locations, and roughly 15 P.O. boxes.
For instance, in one instance in November 2018, the brothers deceitfully induced a claim check for $106.59 that was sent to a business address in their hometown of Temecula, which was just a small fraction of the massive loss which totaled at least $2,367,033, reported by investigators from the United States Postal Service Office of Inspector General, whose probe brought down the elaborate scheme.
The guilty pleas led to a sentencing hearing set for November 1, where the brothers face a steep federal prison sentence of up to 20 years each. This case, painting a picture of deceit and exploitation of federal resources, is prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorney Courtney N. Williams of the Riverside Branch Office.
