LOS ANGELES – A disbarred lawyer was sentenced at the moment to 180 months in federal jail for stealing greater than $4 million from his shoppers by way of quite a lot of means, together with accumulating charges for work he by no means carried out. The case is the results of an intensive investigation by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Workplace of Skilled Accountability (OPR) and the State Bar of California.
Shant Ohanian, 38, of Burbank, was sentenced by U.S. District Decide John A. Kronstadt, who said that he intends at a future date to order Ohanian to pay restitution in an quantity exceeding $2.5 million. Ohanian pleaded responsible in June 2019 to 1 rely of wire fraud and has been in federal custody because the following month, when his bond was revoked due to allegations that he was persevering with to defraud his shoppers.
“ICE won’t stand by as criminals try to fleece susceptible members of our neighborhood,” stated Jeffrey Gilgallon, Particular Agent in Cost for ICE’s Workplace of Skilled Accountability (OPR) Los Angeles. “As an lawyer, Mr. Ohanian took an oath to offer competent illustration to his shoppers. As a substitute, he devised an elaborate Ponzi scheme that paid present victims with funds collected from new victims – disrupting lives and destroying credit score alongside the way in which. ICE OPR will work tirelessly to uncover these schemes and make sure the perpetrators are dropped at justice.”
Ohanian was a licensed California lawyer from January 2012 till his disbarment in December 2017. Throughout his authorized profession, Ohanian defrauded shoppers in want of his authorized help in quite a lot of instances, together with immigration purposes, industrial disputes, divorce petitions and private damage claims. In every case, Ohanian took no significant motion on his shoppers’ behalf regardless of billing them for 1000’s of {dollars} or asking them to pay thousands and thousands of {dollars} in litigation-related charges.
In some instances, Ohanian’s deception brought on his sufferer shoppers to lose their alternatives to acquire vital monetary or authorized treatments due to wrongs they suffered. One shopper, a girl who suffered severe accidents in a fall at South Coast Plaza mall in Orange County, noticed the statute of limitations expire in her case earlier than she realized Ohanian defrauded her. Ohanian admitted to sending the sufferer a phony settlement settlement from the mall and, after she threatened to report him to the State Bar of California, a examine for $25,000 that later turned out to have been cancelled.
In Might 2012, two shoppers employed Ohanian to characterize them in a enterprise dispute, however he didn’t take any steps to successfully litigate their claims regardless of telling them for six years that the case settled of their favor. Ohanian finally offered to them counterfeit checks totaling over $3.1 million to deceive them.
Different shoppers defrauded by Ohanian had sought illustration for immigration-related points. A few of them had been inexperienced card candidates, whereas others had been caught in overseas struggle zones and sought refugee standing within the U.S. In each occasion, Ohanian took their cash, claimed he filed the suitable paperwork, however did nothing.
To cowl his tracks for mendacity for years to 1 shopper who had employed Ohanian to assist receive a inexperienced card, Ohanian claimed to have sued the federal authorities for failure to provide the inexperienced card. He continued his deception through the use of counterfeit emails and court docket orders that included the cast signatures of a state court docket decide and a number of different authorities officers. Ohanian falsely informed the shopper that the U.S. authorities had been ordered to pay over $13.5 million in damages.
In different instances, Ohanian made a number of spoofed phone calls to a shopper looking for restoration of a $500,000 deposit associated to a failed industrial actual property transaction for an Ontario procuring middle. In these calls, Ohanian pretended to be both financial institution officers or authorities officers. Throughout that litigation, Ohanian falsely knowledgeable the sufferer that the sufferer had prevailed within the case and would obtain $7.2 million in damages plus penalties.
Ohanian’s victims suffered precise losses exceeding $4 million.
In a associated case, Ohanian’s spouse, Silva Sevlian Ohanian, 33, of Burbank, has been charged with one rely of wire fraud. She pleaded not responsible to the cost and is presently scheduled to go to trial on September 28.
This case was prosecuted by the U.S. Legal professional for the Central District of California’s Public Corruption and Civil Rights Part.