Serial Minnesota fraudster sentenced to 7 years for defrauding electronics manufacturer

A career criminal with a long history of fraud offenses was sentenced to seven years in federal prison last week for defrauding an electronics manufacturing business.

At a June 23 sentencing hearing, Judge Joan Ericksen commented on how Thomas Thanh Pham has proven himself to be “an efficient and effective perpetrator of fraud” whose crime was “part of a skilled execution of a scheme that he has refined over decades.”

As a result, Pham was immediately ordered into custody because it “was too dangerous and too risky” to the public for him “to remain at liberty.”

“Fraudsters have flocked to Minnesota for far too long,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson. “Pham is no exception. He is a serial fraudster who has demonstrated that he will not stop until he is stopped. Thanks to the hard work of law enforcement, for the next 84 months, Pham will be where he belongs—in prison.”

Pham, a 53-year-old who lives in Burnsville, received his first criminal conviction 32 years ago and has been convicted of numerous fraud offenses since, including in a case out of Texas where Pham used the identities of victim companies to defraud them out of $1.9 million by deceiving them into shipping high-dollar electronics and computers.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office explained Pham’s latest crime in a press release:

Between 2019 and 2020, Pham devised a scheme to defraud a California based company of approximately $1.2 million. Pham, who was the CEO of Enterprise Products, LLC, purported to provide consulting and financial services to commercial clients involved in engineering and manufacturing. Pham held himself out as a broker with supposed business relationships with large, well-known companies. As a supposed broker, Pham claimed he could arrange service agreements between an electronic manufacturing services company based in San Jose, California (identified as Victim A), and his ostensible business affiliates in the electronics and technology sectors.

Pham began a series of discussions with Victim A, in which Pham pitched that Enterprise Products could facilitate multi-million-dollar manufacturing and repair contracts between Victim A and large electronics companies. None of that was true. To give the appearance of legitimacy, Pham arranged for a friend of his to pose as a corporate executive with Pham and Victim A in supposed contract negotiations. Unbeknownst to Victim A, Pham’s associate was not a business executive. In fact, Pham’s “business executive associate” was a fellow ex-convict whom Pham met while serving a prior federal prison sentence for fraud.

Pham supplied Victim A with bogus documents, including fabricated contracts, correspondence, and business proposals. As part of the scheme, Pham first required Victim A to pay a “deposit bond” in the amount of $1,278,000. Pham’s fraudulent tactics resulted in Victim A agreeing to enter into a contract in September 2019, through which Victim A ostensibly would receive millions of dollars in exchange for repair services. Pham unsuccessfully pitched other phony deals to Victim A that purportedly involved even larger financial contracts deals with other companies.

As part of the scheme and to give the impression that he was fulfilling the fraudulent contract, Pham caused the initial delivery to Victim A in California of approximately 20 samples of electronic devices that supposedly required repairs by Victim A. However, Pham failed to disclose to Victim A that these 20 “sample” devices were, in fact, stolen property. Pham then lulled Victim A into a false sense of security by offering a series of excuses and promises when Victim A either inquired about its money or demanded a refund. Rather than maintain the money securely in a refundable escrow as promised, Pham fraudulently misappropriated Victim A’s funds for a series of unauthorized uses and transactions.

Pham was ordered to pay restitution in the amount of $2,943,840.

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