Rudy Kurniawan, a California wine collector and dealer, was charged by U.S. prosecutors with fraud, including a scheme to sell more than $1.3 million in counterfeit wine.
http://liarcatchers.com/fraud_investigation.html
Prosecutors charged Kurniawan with “multiple fraudulent schemes relating to his wine business” from 2007 to 2012, including phony wine sales and fraudulent loan applications.
“The bad-faith sale of any commodity you know to be a counterfeit, fake or forgery is a felony,” Janice Fedarcyk, head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s New York office, said in a statement today. “Whether you are peddling a Picasso or a Petrus, a Botticelli or a Burgundy, unless it is what you say it is, the sale is a fraud.”
Kurniawan, 35, an Indonesian man living in Arcadia, California, was arrested today and charged with three counts of wire fraud and two counts of mail fraud. He was scheduled to appear in federal court in Los Angeles today, according the statement. The charges were unsealed today.
In 2009, billionaire wine collector William Koch sued Kurniawan in Los Angeles state court claiming he had sold him phony vintages. If convicted, Kurniawan, who is living in the U.S. illegally, faces as many as 20 years in prison on each of the fraud charges, according to prosecutors.
The case is U.S. v. Kurniawan, 12-MAG-606, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).
