A federal grand jury on Tuesday indicted an Orange County, California man on charges that he fraudulently obtained access to Boeing employees’ retirement accounts. The man is accused of siphoning their money by making hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of fraudulent money transfers to himself.
Hoa Vo, 30, whose aliases include “Hoa Thanh Tran Vo” and “Andy Vo,” of Santa Ana, is charged with three counts of bank fraud and one count of aggravated identity theft.
According to the indictment, from January 2019 to June 2019, Vo obtained the personal identifying information of Boeing employees, along with information about their retirement accounts, known as Voluntary Investment Plan (VIP) accounts.
Vo then allegedly made fraudulent withdrawal requests for checks and electronic money transfers totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars from the VIP accounts of various Boeing employees.
Manipulating the mail
Knowing that notifications and checks related to these fraudulent requests would be mailed out, Vo placed holds on the Boeing employees’ mail with the United States Postal Service, the indictment further alleges.
Once the mail was held, Vo allegedly intercepted the mail by presenting to a postal employee a fraudulent California driver’s license with a Boeing employee’s personal identifying information, and a fraudulent note purportedly written or signed by the Boeing employee authorizing Vo to pick up the employee’s mail.
Vo allegedly then deposited the stolen checks into a bank account that had been fraudulently opened in a Boeing employee’s name. Vo also cashed checks written to himself from the fraudulently opened bank account by using the Boeing employee’s forged signature, and endorsed the checks himself, according to the indictment.
In total, Vo attempted to obtain approximately $783,328 from Boeing employees’ VIP accounts, and actually obtained approximately $360,847, the indictment alleges.
If convicted of all charges, Vo would face a statutory maximum sentence of 92 years in federal prison.
The United States Secret Service, the Huntington Beach Police Department, the Irvine Police Department, and the Westminster Police Department investigated the case.