Police in Montgomery County, Maryland, say a second suspect in a gold bar scheme that bilked one woman out of nearly $800,000 has been arrested in Chicago, apparently trying to flee the country.
Neel Patel, 23, of Carol Stream, Illinois, was arrested July 23 at Chicago O’Hare International Airport attempting to board a flight to Dublin, Ireland, police said.
According to police, Patel is one of two men who posed as FBI agents and picked up the gold bars from the woman, who had been told she was giving them to the authorities for safekeeping.
The other suspect, 34-year-old Wenhui Sun, of Lake Forest, California, was arrested in Montgomery County in March.
In a news release Wednesday, police said Patel had been extradited back to Maryland on Tuesday and was being held at the Montgomery County Central Processing Unit, awaiting a bond hearing.
News of the arrest comes as the county has seen a proliferation of gold bar scams, in which often elderly residents are scammed into converting large sums of money into gold bars and then handing them over to fraudsters.
In this case, police said the victim went to police in March saying she had been contacted by a man who identified himself as being with the Office of the Inspector General with the Federal Trade Commission. He told her she was the victim of identity theft, which had led to a federal investigation involving drugs and money laundering.
The woman was directed to transfer all assets into gold bars, which were supposedly going to be picked up by an FBI agent to take to the U.S. Treasury Department.
The woman complied with the demands and handed off two separate deliveries of gold bars to the fake FBI agents, worth a combined $789,000.
Last month, police said they had arrested a 52-year-old Maryland man accused of swindling a 74-year-old man out of more than $1 million converted into gold bars. He only suspected he was the victim of fraud when he saw a local news report about another, similar scam.
Montgomery County State’s Attorney John McCarthy told WTOP earlier this month there have been at least 17 victims of these types of scams in the county who have lost millions of dollars in total.
Police told WTOP last month the scams often target older adults, who are apparently seen as choice targets because they often have a lot of money in retirement savings.
Gold is also difficult for police to track.
“Once you have the gold, if you end up melting it and turning it into different pieces of jewelry, we would never the know the difference,” said Detective Sean Petty, of the Montgomery County Police Department’s financial crimes division.
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