Feds garnish over $1 million from fraudsters living in Montana

Despite losses to fraud increasing exponentially locally and across the United States, Montana financial watchdogs recently announced that they had prevented roughly $2 million in fraud losses so far this year.

On July 29, California resident Wei Jia Luo appeared before U.S. District Judge Susan P. Watters at the federal courthouse in Billings. The Chinese national had previously pleaded guilty to wire fraud for his role in badgering and defrauding an elderly Joliet man. Two years ago, the Joliet resident went to the Carbon County Sheriff’s Office to report that he’d been led to believe agents with the Federal Trade Commission told him he was “out of compliance,” and he needed to address the matter by giving the agents massive sums of money.

Luo was one of the couriers who met with the Joliet man, taking thousands of dollars from him under the guise that the payments were meant to get the Joliet man square with the FTC. Through withdrawing his savings and liquidating his investments, the Joliet man ultimately lost $182,000. Luo was indicted at the end of 2025, and in 2025, authorities arrested him in Arizona after combing through rental car and flight data.

“The brazen and despicable fraud in this case shocks the conscience and the defendant should be deeply ashamed,” wrote Assistant U.S. Attorney Colin Rubich in court documents filed leading up to Lou’s sentencing. “Luo and his coconspirators systematically tricked an elderly man out of most of his assets. Assets that he had accumulated over a lifetime of hard work as a carpenter. Now, because of the defendant, (the victim), who is 74 years old, will have to continue working as a carpenter for the foreseeable future.”

At Luo’s sentencing, Judge Watters ordered Luo to spend two years and three months in prison and to pay restitution of $181,000 back to the Joliet man. After serving his prison sentence, Luo will be deported back to China, where he has a wife and two children.

On Aug. 3, the U.S. Attorney’s Office publicized recovering nearly $332,704 from a former California resident now living in Montana who had conned 14 people into investing in a “private portfolio” that wound up just being his bank account.

Thomas Brown Hammond was ordered to pay $536,521 in restitution. Recently, Hammond came into some money through an inheritance, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office garnished a portion of it to pay back Hammond’s victims.

While Hammond was sentenced in 2012, federal law allows authorities to continue to collect restation from convicted frauds for up to 20 years.

On Friday, the U.S. Attorney’s Office announced that it had garnished some $848,000 from a man operating a shady dairy coop in Bozeman.

In 2011, Jeffrey Nicholas McCown was sentenced to three years in prison and ordered to pay $1,163,959 in restitution for embezzling funds while the general manager for Country Classic Dairy. Earlier this year, the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s Financial Litigation Unit became aware of McCown receiving payments from the sale of a business and real estate and seized nearly $850,000 from those sales.

Since 2020, the proportion of those sentenced for federal fraud crimes in Montana have nearly doubled. That year, cases of fraud and embezzlement made up just over 6% of all sentencings in Montana’s federal court rooms. In 2025, such cases jumped to nearly 11% of all sentencing, according to data published by the United States Sentencing Commission.