Three West Coast men have been indicted by a federal grand jury in Pittsburgh for scamming western Pennsylvania residents out of hundreds of thousands of dollars using the well-known “grandparents scam.”
A one-count indictment issued yesterday names 54-year-old Roderick Feurtado and 45-year-old Tarek Bouanane, both of Las Vegas, and 49-year-old Roberto Gutierrez of Reseda, California, who are accused of scamming people out of at least $250,000,
Federal prosecutors say the three men most often called victims, posing as an attorney, and claimed that a relative, usually a grandchild, was in jail and needed bail money and legal fees. Bouanane and Gutierrez then flew to Pittsburgh and went to the victims’ homes to collect the money.
State police and the Department of Homeland Security investigated. The release from the U.S. Attorney’s office does not detail exactly where exactly the victims lived, except that they were in western Pennsylvania.
