A federal grand jury in Greeneville returned a 15-count indictment on February 8, towards Johntavis Rogers, 24, of Fort Myers, Florida, for wire fraud, financial institution fraud, cash laundering, and aggravated identification theft.
Rogers appeared in court docket on March 3, earlier than U.S. Justice of the Peace Decide Cynthia Richardson Wyrick and entered a plea of not responsible to the costs within the indictment.
Rogers had beforehand been arrested in Fort Myers on February 18, and was launched pending trial, which now has been set for August 16, in United States District Court docket, in Greeneville, Tennessee.
The indictment alleges that Rogers used interstate wire communications to defraud monetary establishments. Based on the indictment, Rogers contacted unsuspecting individuals within the Jap District of Tennessee via varied social media platforms, reminiscent of Fb, Messenger, and Instagram. Rogers would persuade unsuspecting victims that he had found a technique to legitimately deposit funds into their accounts with monetary establishments and share the proceeds. When prospects offered their account login data, the indictment alleges that Rogers would use on-line banking functions to deposit fraudulent checks into their accounts after which trigger the switch of proceeds from these checks to himself. The indictment alleges that the scheme affected six monetary establishments on this space between March 2021 and August 2021.
If convicted of financial institution fraud, Rogers faces a time period of 30 years in jail, a positive of $1 million, and as much as 5 years on supervised launch.
The investigation was led by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Cyber Crime Activity Drive, The Prison Investigative Division of the Tennessee Freeway Patrol, and the White Pine Police Division.