101 Individuals Indicted in Texas for Transnational Cell Phone Trafficking

A federal grand jury in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas returned a seven-count indictment against 101 individuals in a cellphone trafficking scheme, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Texas said Aug. 26 in a news release. Per the superseding indictment, the individuals stole personal electronics via armed robbery or fraud schemes in North Texas then shipped them overseas for sale. The personal electronics include cellphones, tablets, laptops and smart watches. The indictment alleges that the accused parties coordinated a series of armed robberies, as many as 23, in AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon retail cellphone stores around Dallas. The losses from the robberies is estimated at around $500,000.

In one instance, four people were arrested after robbing an AT&T store in Fort Worth. An investigation linked the four to a cellphone business in Dallas doing business as Global One Wireless. The owners, Abdul Basit Bhangda and Arsalan Bhangda, allegedly acted through a parent company, RJ Telecom, to sell goods abroad by exporting the merchandise to foreign import companies in the United Arab Emirates and Hong Kong, the release said.

Other elements of the scheme involved other conspirators who used store employees to activate phones using fake identities or by illicitly adding lines to legitimate customer accounts, the indictment said. The charged individuals would also use fake identities along with real customer information to change SIM cards, enabling the verification of banking information and the withdrawal of funds from customer bank accounts. The indictment said that around $100 million worth of goods were shipped to foreign importers and that the overall losses are more than $42 million.