Money laundering happens. And it is not just the big mythical sort of men like Al Capone or the Mexican Drug Cartel, it happens in small towns and cities across the United States, with people running small scams, small scams which add up to large amounts of money being laundered on a daily basis. Anti-money laundering investigations are currently being conducted in just about every city, and one such case involved the prosecution of a man in Grand Rapids, Michigan just a few weeks ago.
Originally from Kalamazoo, Nicholas A. Woodhams recieved, on August 25th, a thirteen month sentence in prison. He was also fined $648,568, which is to be paid to the Apple Computer Corporation, as restitution for a scam involving the iPod. He is also to pay the United States Postal Service just over $8,000. Woodhams case involved money laundering and mail fraud. He managed to guess serial numbers of the devices that were still under factory warranty. He then went to the web site created by Apple for their return program, each time assuming a different identity, for a different “customer”, claiming to have a broken or a malfunctioning iPod.
During the time between March of the year 2006 and October of 2007, he managed to get the Apple corporation to send him more than nine thousand replacement iPods, which he received in a post office box he rented from the US Postal Service. What did Woodhams do with these iPods? He sold them, of course, at a fraction of the retail value offered in stores. And not only that, when he shipped them to the people who ordered them from his website, he used counterfeit stamps and postage which he created using software on photo finishing.
This is what originally captured the attention of the Postal inspectors. He laundered more than two hundred thousands dollars of the proceeds from his iPod sales through a Michigan based financial institution to a Missouri brokerage firm. On top of the fines, the restitution and the jail time, he forfeited about 3/4 of one million dollars he had tucked away, his home, his everyday-use-car, an Audi, and his race car, an Atom Two by Ariel, his motorcycle and more than five hundred thousand dollars in cash. A brilliant scheme, that fell to the intense and the thorough investigative teams that are out and about right now fighting corruption on every level.