TRUE CRIMES

San Bernardino County.

  40 year old Robert McCoy, was sentenced to five years in federal prison, in June 2004, for his Russian bride scam that cheated men out of more than US$1 million. His Russian wife, and the mother of his 2-year-old daughter, 32 year old Anna Grountovaia, received a sentence of three years probation after having served 11 months in jail for her role in the scheme.

San Diego-based federal prosecutor Richard Cheng says 352 victims were positively identified by Investigators, but there may be more.

The sentence was imposed after a plea bargain agreement in which McCoy of Rancho Cucamonga admitted defrauding more than 250 men & agreed to pay back his victims $737,521. Other charges were dropped by prosecutors.

Russian Grountovaia, pleaded guilty to fraud and may be deported. Having met McCoy through the Internet before moving into his home, she posed as a prospective bride in telephone calls with victims, including several San Diego men. McCoy had already been running the scam when she met him and she played a minor part in the scam, during phone calls when McCoy needed a woman with a Russian accent, her lawyer said.

In court, lawyer Timothy Scott said, most of the victims had spoken with women in Russia.

Court documents show, McCoy, a drug-addicted felon, who sports gang tattoos, has a long criminal history with convictions for kidnapping, assault, and weapons charges.

In court, prosecutor Cheng detailed McCoy’s scheme. McCoy placed & answered personal advertisements on Web sites where he met his victims. Those Web sites included America Online and Match.com. McCoy would write e-mails posing as a Russian woman seeking love and then send pictures of a pretty model to his victims. Then would come the time for a visit to be organised, at which point the victim was told a Russian dating agency required $1,800 for the cost of a visa and plane tickets.

Posing as an administrator from a bogus dating service, McCoy would email the victims on the day the woman was to arrive, explaining that there was a problem with a new regulation that required the woman to carry $1500 cash to gain entry to the United States. The dating agency would grant her $500, but the victim needed to wire an additional $1,000.

The men would learn days later that they had been scammed, when e-mails were ignored & eventually bounced back as McCoy closed the accounts.

The FBI ran an investigation into the scam after a Baltimore man who had been deceived by McCoy gave his story to a London newspaper.

McCoy, who blames his drug addiction as the reason for his crime, regrets his actions & plans to use his time in jail to rid himself of his drug addiction, says his defence lawyer, Arthur Greenspan.

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