A man who engaged in an elaborate series of frauds in order to buy high-end vehicles – under fake credit – which were then shipped offshore to Africa, will spend another 129 days in jail after receiving a total of 18 months in jail for his crimes.
Doudou Kabilwa Twite, 32, was handed the sentence Monday in North Vancouver provincial court by provincial court Judge Joanne Challenger, who gave Twite credit for the time he’s spent in jail since his arrest.
Twite, from Ottawa, received the sentence after pleading guilty to seven charges of fraud over $5,000 and one charge of identity theft.
The scheme, which Twite carried out between December 2016 and March 2017, included buying seven luxury SUVs and trucks worth a combined $600,000 at dealerships around the Lower Mainland. Twite bought the vehicles under fake identities after first opening bank accounts and establishing lines of credit under other people’s names, said Crown prosecutor Victoria Hanna.
Once the vehicles were purchased, they were loaded onto containers at one of Metro Vancouver’s port terminals and shipped out of the country, bound for the Congo.
Twite also used fake credit to buy 15 high-end cellphones and related services worth approximately $11,000.
At the time of his arrest, in March, Twite had racked up almost $100,000 on a Bank of Montreal line of credit, established with fake ID.
Twite’s illegal export business came to an end when an alert bank teller at the West Vancouver Toronto Dominion Canada Trust noticed that a man trying to open an account matched a description of a suspected fraudster that had circulated to bank employees.
Police grew suspicious when Twite was found in possession of a number of identity documents in different names – all including his photograph.
He was financially desperate at the time, said Glouberman, so when a friend in Quebec asked for help with the scheme “he did not ask a lot of questions.”
Glouberman said he was not the mastermind behind the scheme, but merely a foot soldier in the criminal enterprise, who was to be paid $500 for buying each vehicle and $200 for opening each bank account.
Read the full story over at North Shore News.
