Gjergj Mihilli pleaded guilty to bank fraud and aggravated identify theft. Nino Mihilli and Nikolas Mihilli each pleaded guilty to transactional money laundering.
The trio operated a money order fraud scheme from the Mama Mia Panaderia & Market in Chandler, which is owned by Gjergj Mihilli. In addition to food sales, the store offered a variety of financial transaction services to customers, including money order sales.
Gjergj Mihilli contracted with Merchants Bank of California in order for the store to sell the bank’s Unigram money orders. The store also maintained two business accounts with Wells Fargo Bank. Beginning around May 2010, the trio is alleged to have conspired to operate a scheme in which the store issued thousands of false, worthless money orders, utilizing fictitious names. These false money orders were then deposited into the Wells Fargo business accounts, thus artificially inflating the account balances, so that funds were made available to pay Merchants Bank for issuing the money orders.
In order to perpetuate the scheme, the defendants were required to continually issue and deposit false money orders. The indictment alleges that the defendants issued and deposited more than 10,000 false money orders totaling approximately $10 million. A portion of those funds were unlawfully withdrawn by the defendants for their personal and business use.
Sentencing for all three is scheduled for September 23, 2013.
The investigation was conducted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation and Chandler Police Department.