NC man, 2 others charged in multi-million dollar wire fraud scheme

CHARLOTTE — Three men were sentenced to prison on Tuesday for their involvement in an international multi-million dollar technical support fraud scheme.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of North Carolina announced the sentences following a conspiracy to commit wire fraud that targeted victims across the United States.

The conspiracy used malicious internet pop-up advertisements to freeze victims’ computers and trick them into believing their devices were infected with viruses, officials said. Victims were directed to call phone numbers that connected them to India-based call centers where operators posed as Microsoft employees. These operators charged victims hundreds or thousands of dollars to fix non-existent computer problems and no actual technical support was provided.

A Charlotte man, 36-year-old Nachiket Banwari, was sentenced to 30 months in prison followed by three years of supervised release. Hunter G. Mello, 42, of Sandwich, Mass., was ordered to serve 40 months in prison followed by three years of supervised release. Richard Paul Nolan, 60, of Colorado Springs, was sentenced to 24 months in prison followed by three years of supervised release. The court ordered the three defendants to collectively forfeit $3,711,000 in proceeds from the scheme, officials said.

Banwari worked for Capstone Technologies, a company headquartered in Charlotte, prosecutors said. For his participation in the scheme, Banwari received 3% of the company’s revenue, which amounted to $222,334.

Mello served as a broker of pop-up call leads, working with creators to sell these leads to various call centers. He generated more than $20 million in sales and profited as much as $2 million from the operation, prosecutors said. Mello also used his financial accounts to transfer fraud proceeds to overseas bank accounts belonging to the pop-up publishers, officials said.

Nolan participated in the scheme by creating and operating TrackDrive, a platform used to route calls to the centers. He worked with publishers to ensure the pop-ups effectively locked computers and displayed correct routing numbers, prosecutors said. Nolan’s platform routed approximately 15 million calls, earning him a fee for each call. He profited approximately $2 million, and the total loss associated with his involvement reached approximately $19 million.

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