Three former executives of USA Dry Van Logistics, a cross-border carrier, were arrested following an indictment which charged them with wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. One of the arrested executives, ex-CEO Sergio Lagos, has pled guilty to his role in the $26 million fraud scheme.
In addition to Lagos, Aurelio “Jim” Aleman and Oscar Barbosa, the former chief operations officer and former controller, were also charged with the same crimes.
According to a press release published by the FBI, employees were told to manually create invoices for millions of dollars of receivables to make the company look more profitable than it actually was. Then fraudulent support documents were created to back up the phony invoices. Using that artificially inflated data, the executives submitted false financial documents to GE Capital Corporation, the lending company for the carrier, and as a result were able to draw larger lines of credit.
When the fraud was exposed, the carrier went in to bankruptcy and Lagos, Aleman, and Barbosa were all charged with their crimes. By the time that happened however, they were able to swindle more than $26 million dollars from GECC.
In a happy ending to this story, the carrier was able to emerge from bankruptcy under new – and hopefully more trustworthy – leadership and is back in business!
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Source: fbi, themonitor, truckinginfo, krgv, heraldonline
Fraud in trucking, go figure.
For all you newbies out there, fraud exists everywhere in the trucking business. There’s just more fraud some places than others.
Yeah, trustworthy. Sure it is.
This article is such BS. USA dry van did not reopen, its assets (trucking fleet) were acquired by Celedon and its former location in McAllen Texas is being used by CRST. How is this possible for the company to reopen? It cannot. Sergio Lagos went to work for americorp xpress in Pharr Texas, after his indictment. The company hung hundreds of drivers out to dry and these executives received a slap on the wrist. Poorly written article.
Now my understanding is that Americorp Xpress Carriers is in the process of going out of business!!