Two U.S. Men Convicted for Conning Mumbai Diamond Merchants

Two New York-based men have been convicted for defrauding Mumbai diamond merchants of more than $12 million in loose diamonds.

Sholom Muratov, 36 and Menachem Abramov, 32, were convicted on Oct. 24 after a seven day trial in a Manhattan Federal Court on charges of conspiring to defraud diamond sellers.

According to an official statement, ten other defendants have reportedly pleaded guilty in connection with this scam.

United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York Geoffrey S. Berman said, “These defendants engaged in a brazen, multimillion-dollar fraud scheme extending from New York to Mumbai.”

Further, Muratov and Abramov have been found guilty of conspiring to commit mail fraud which carries a maximum jail sentence of up to 20 years. Muratov will be sentenced on Mar. 26, 2019, and Abramov will be sentenced two days later by Judge Lorna G. Schofield, who presided over the trial.

The statement reveals that the duo was a part of a well-coordinated and wide-ranging conspiracy to con a group of diamond wholesalers in Mumbai out of millions of dollars in loose diamonds known as “melee” diamonds. The sham included several false representations of numbers to the victim merchants.

They deceived the victims by showing their corporate affiliations, longevity, and track records of those corporations. They also deceived the Indian merchants by convincing that the defendants were not affiliated with one another, and most significantly they implied to agree to payment terms proposed by the Indian merchants to induce them to release diamonds without having received full payment.

By these successful fraudulent misrepresentations, the defendants managed to convince the Indian merchants to provide them loose diamonds worth over $12 million, for which Muratov, Abramov, and their co-conspirators provided no payment.  These diamonds were later sold in Manhattan’s Diamond District.

In May, two Indian-origin men were among three men charged in the U.S. for allegedly orchestrating a huge multi-million dollar investment scam. The three were accused of defrauding investors to the tune of $300 million in connection with funding of a merger transaction designed to convert their company into a private entity.

 Earlier this year, New York-based Anilesh Ahuja who served as the founder, CEO, and Chief Investment Officer of Premium Point Investments LLP, that looked into hedge funds focused on structured credits products, was arrested based on his alleged “participation in securities fraud and wire fraud which related to mismarking of certain securities held in hedge funds that the firm looked into, thereby fraudulently inflating the net asset value of those funds as reported to investors and potential investors from 2014 to 2016.”