Source: Office of United States Attorneys
RALEIGH, N.C. – Acting U.S. Attorney Daniel P. Bubar announced today that the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of North Carolina collected over $20 million in criminal and civil actions in Fiscal Year 2024. Of this amount, over $14 million was collected in criminal actions and over $6 million was collected in civil actions.
Additionally, the Eastern District of North Carolina worked with other U.S. Attorney’s Offices and components of the Department of Justice to collect an additional $27,680.71 in cases pursued jointly by these offices.
The Eastern District of North Carolina’s successful collection efforts included the identification and recovery of over $800,000.00 transferred and concealed by criminal defendant Shephard Spruill, who participated in fraudulent billings to Medicaid by abusing his access to patient information. In another example of successful enforcement, the Eastern District of North Carolina recovered over $500,000 from civil defendant Michael Robinson for amounts fraudulently obtained from farm assistance programs run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The recovery of funds fraudulently obtained from such government programs is vital for ensuring the preservation of important public resources.
The U.S. Attorneys’ Offices, along with the department’s litigating divisions, are responsible for enforcing and collecting civil and criminal debts owed to the U.S. and criminal debts owed to federal crime victims. The law requires defendants to pay restitution to victims of certain federal crimes who have suffered a physical injury or financial loss. While restitution is paid to the victim, criminal fines and felony assessments are paid to the department’s Crime Victims Fund, which distributes the funds collected to federal and state victim compensation and victim assistance programs.
The Eastern District of North Carolina also aggressively pursued criminal and civil asset forfeiture remedies to disgorge criminals of their ill-gotten gains and recover funds that can subsequently be remitted to the victims of financial crime. Working with partner agencies and divisions, this office collected over two million in asset forfeiture actions in FY 2024. Forfeited assets deposited into the Department of Justice Assets Forfeiture Fund are used to restore funds to crime victims and for a variety of law enforcement purposes.
In addition to those deposits, during Fiscal Year 2024, the Eastern District of North Carolina, in partnership with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, seized and processed for forfeiture nearly $5 million in Tether (USDT) cryptocurrency that is alleged to be proceeds of cryptocurrency confidence investment schemes, a type of fraud scheme in which fraudsters develop romantic or other personal online relationships with a victim and then convince them to invest substantial sums of money through fake apps that are designed to look like legitimate cryptocurrency exchange apps, but instead deceive the victim into believing that they are earning high rates of return on their investments while really funneling the cryptocurrency directly to the fraudsters’ personal wallets. Even larger cryptocurrency seizures and forfeitures are anticipated and in progress in the coming year as law enforcement works aggressively to combat this devastating form of criminal activity.
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