{"id":23263,"date":"2020-02-26T15:12:43","date_gmt":"2020-02-26T15:12:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/navytimes\/uncategorized\/2020\/02\/26\/his-fraud-ring-posed-as-a-navy-officer\/"},"modified":"2026-08-08T19:20:41","modified_gmt":"2026-08-08T19:20:41","slug":"his-fraud-ring-posed-as-a-navy-officer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/navytimes\/news\/your-navy\/2020\/02\/26\/his-fraud-ring-posed-as-a-navy-officer\/","title":{"rendered":"This fraud ring posed as a Navy officer"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A Los Angeles man linked to an international fraud ring<\/a> that masqueraded as a Navy official to steal millions of dollars worth of electronics will stay behind bars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On Tuesday in Greenbelt, Maryland, U.S. District Judge George Hazel<\/a> handed down a four-year prison sentence for Saul Eady, 36, who\u2019s been in pretrial confinement since his late 2018 arrest, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first of nine defendants to be sentenced, Eady also was ordered to pay $640,172.80 in restitution and will spend three more years on supervised release after he leaves federal prison.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eady pleaded guilty in November to conspiring to commit mail and wire fraud, nearly three years after Homeland Security Investigations agents in Cape Canaveral asked their colleagues in Baltimore to investigate \u201cDaniel Drunz,\u201d a man believed to have been posing as a Navy contracting officer to obtain sensitive commodities from cleared defense contractors<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But there was no Daniel Drunz. He was an electronic ghost attached to a \u201cnavy-mil.us\u201d domain name acquired from Yahoo in 2015, according to Eady\u2019s criminal complaint.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Court records indicate that the fraud and money laundering ring linking grifters in California, Virginia, Maryland, Mexico and Nigeria used the bogus Drunz to order computers, specialized communications components, Apple iPhones, tablets and large screen televisions from a trio of companies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The names of the victim firms are redacted in the court records, but one that\u2019s headquartered in the state of Washington provides wireless voice and data services. Another in Virginia is a wholesale distributor of audio and video products. The third is a defense contractor in Maryland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Without prior payment, the hoodwinked firms shipped the equipment to offices in Frederick, Maryland, and Chantilly, Virginia, that had been rented with stolen identities. From there, hundreds of televisions and other equipment was marked for shipment to California, Nigeria and Mexico.<\/p>\n\n\n\t