Clark Summit Man Sentenced to 121 Months’ Imprisonment for Bank and Credit Card Fraud Scheme
| U.S. Attorney’s Office December 03, 2010 |
The United States Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, today announced that Joseph P. Donahue, of Clarks Summit, Pennsylvania was sentenced yesterday to 121 months in prison and five years of supervised release by United States District Senior Judge James M. Munley. He was also ordered to pay in excess of $300,000 in restitution to the victims of his criminal schemes.
According to United States Attorney Peter J. Smith, Donahue was convicted in March of this year of bank fraud, money laundering, false statements, and credit card fraud after a three-week trial.
The evidence at trial proved that Donahue would enlist and recruit shareholders, investors, and partners in various businesses that the defendant owned and controlled, offering them, in exchange for their paying a share of the operating expenses, a share in the profits of the particular business.
With the knowledge of his partners, Donahue obtained credit cards from various financial institutions, putting the credit cards in the names of the investors, for the purpose of paying for the operating expenses of a particular corporation that the defendant owned and controlled. Unbeknownst to the investors, however, Donahue would obtain additional credit cards and loans from financial institutions in their names by obtaining on-line credit card applications and by forging their names on the applications, identifying corporations unknown to the partners.
Donahue would then use these fraudulently-acquired credit cards to incur expenses to which the investors had not consented and for which they would be liable. By forging the investors’ names to loan applications, Donahue also committed bank fraud and money laundering.
U.S. Attorney Smith praised the work of the Scranton office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which tracked a decade of criminal fraud by Donahue. Assistant U.S. Attorney Gordon Zubrod coordinated the investigation and tried the case.