12 charged in 'elaborate' $3M credit card scheme, AG says



Aqeel Ahmed, 60, of Secaucus,

TRENTON — The sign slumped in the window of the ramshackle carpet store on Monticello Ave. in Jersey City said they had the "best price in town."

But, state and federal authorities claim, the operators of USA United Trading were fleecing banks out of more than $1 million.
They were among a dozen foreign nationals and U.S. citizens charged with money laundering this week in a crackdown on an "elaborate" credit card scheme, acting Attorney General John Hoffman announced Wednesday.

All told, the accused — some of them family members, some business associates living mostly in Hudson County — stole $3 million by passing bad checks and making phony credit card payments, authorities claim.

Charged were:

• Naim Tahir, 47, of Clark
• Hassan Shahbaz, 42, of Jersey City
• Aqeel Ahmed, 60, of Secaucus
• Shama Munir, 49, of Secaucus
• Faisal Mushtaq, 37, of Secaucus
• Mohammad Shakeel, 46, of Jersey City
• Muhammad Farooq Bhatti, 64, of Jersey City
• Rilvan Junaid, 49, of Spring Valley, N.Y.
• Shakeela Ahmed, 56, of Secaucus
• Aqeel Sheikh, 54, of Secaucus
• Mahamed Khan, 53, of Piscataway
• Huda Ahmed, 27, of Secaucus

Eleven of them are being held at Union County jail on $1 million bail, authorities said. Khan remains at large. Charged with first degree money laundering, they face up to 20 years in prison.

Hoffman said Wednesday the investigation is ongoing, "but we're confident that with these arrests, we've dismantled this prolific theft ring in New Jersey."

'Bust-out' scheme busted

The so-called bust-out scheme would start with Tahir, authorities claim, who was allegedly responsible for creating "synthetic" identities by pairing real Social Security numbers with phony names and birth dates, which the others would use to open checking accounts and credit cards online.

Then, police claim, they deposited bad checks into the accounts and used them to make payments to the credit cards in order to inflate their lines of credit, or to make ATM withdrawals and money orders before the banks could determine the checks were bad.

Eventually, the group allegedly "busted out" the credit cards by running them up to their limits, often by using a group of phony merchants in on the scheme, authorities claim.

USA United Trading, operated by Hassan Shahbaz, was allegedly one of those shell companies, which "held itself out as a carpet retailer" on a street lined with minimarts and hair salons, even displaying rolled-up carpets in the window, according to a statement from the state Division of Criminal Justice.

Often, police said, these companies were set up solely to obtain credit card terminals to make phony charges on the cards. The operators of those shell companies also allegedly wrote checks to each other to appear as if they were conducting regular business and defraud the banks out of more money, authorities claim.

The credit card holders and the shell company operators then allegedly split the proceeds.

A spokesman for the Attorney General's Office said Wednesday that many of the phony credit card applicants also listed the shell companies as their place of employment.

Police say the scheme fell apart when Wells Fargo Bank began investigating a phony check case, and referred it to the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, which brought in state and federal investigators from the Attorney General's Office and the Newark office of ICE Homeland Security Investigations, among others.

On Tuesday, police executed search warrants at four locations, including several residences and "drop locations" used to receive mail from the banks and credit card companies. They also seized nearly half a million dollars in cash and from bank accounts controlled by ring members, authorities said.

Authorities declined to comment on how the money was being used. Peter Aseltine, the attorney general spokesman, said Aqeel Ahmed and Shakeela Ahmed were married, and that their daughter, Huda Ahmed was married to Faisal Mushtaq.

Aside from Tahir, who is accused of making the "synthetic" identities, the others "were all associated in some way with businesses that were being used to conduct fraudulent credit card transactions," Aseltine said.

A message left with USA United Trading's listed number, which belonged to Hassan Shahbaz, was not returned Wednesday. It was not clear whether any of the accused had retained or been assigned attorneys.

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