In the past year, a new joint task force in Orange County has enabled a small group of prosecutors and investigators to zone in on nonviolent crimes where victims had suffered monetary losses.
“We have focused on the smaller and mid-level cases involving contractors and fraudsters who rip the public the most in our first year,” said Orange County District Attorney David Hoovler in an interview with The Epoch Times on Feb. 26. “I think the unit results speak for themselves.”
Established last March, the district attorney’s office spearheaded the multi-agency white-collar crime task force with strong manpower support from Orange County Sheriff Paul Arteta.
Four local police departments in Newburgh, Woodbury, Warwick, and Crawford have also contributed to the joint task force.
Over the past 12 months, the task force has opened about 50 cases and closed nearly half of them, mostly home improvement contractor fraud and embezzlement cases.
As white-collar crime prosecutions grow, so does the public awareness of pursuing justice in such cases.
On Feb. 23, just one day after news broke of a New Windsor man’s arrest for contractor fraud, seven individuals who had previously not thought they had a criminal case came forward to law enforcement as victims of similar crimes, according to Richard Moran, task force supervisor and chief trial assistant district attorney.
“There is a misconception by people that, when someone tricks you into giving them money, or if an employee steals money, what you have is only a civil case, but it is also a crime,” Mr. Moran told The Epoch Times on Feb. 23.
“A lot of people came forward to us not because they expected to get their money back—a lot of people that steal money don’t have money—but because they don’t want it to happen to another person,” he added.
When perpetrators have the money to pay full restitution, prosecutors can factor it into the cases, such as a recent restoration of $19,000 for a false worker’s compensation benefits claim in the county.
As white-collar crimes are paper-intensive and often stray into legal fields beyond the traditional penal code, lawyer-prosecutors typically get involved on day one to guide the investigations, Mr. Moran said.
Before joining the district attorney’s office in Orange County in 2020, Mr. Moran had headed a similar special investigations unit in neighboring Rockland County for five years.
The task force members also often interface with outside agencies during their investigations, such as the state Department of Taxation and Finance, the state Office of the Medicaid Inspector General, and the county Department of Social Services.
“Some departments have people embedded within our unit who are immediately available for questions; sometimes, they ask for a subpoena to discuss it,” said task force senior investigator Timothy Riordan, who was assigned to the unit along with two other investigators by Mr. Arteta.
Last July, a former Montgomery resident was arrested for a $1.6 million digital currency fraud scheme following a joint effort by the task force and the state Department of Financial Services.
Mr. Riordan said several investigators on the task force, including himself, had previous federal task force experience, which cultivated skills beneficial for solving white-collar crimes.
“It not only opened up the network and resources for you to multiply forces but also kind of taught you to sit back, be open-minded—not get tunnel vision—and be patient, thinking that this isn’t a sprint but a marathon when you are working on these types of cases,” he recently told The Epoch Times.
Like the joint narcotics task force, the countywide white-collar unit serves as a resource for local police departments that do not have the bandwidth to pursue such complex crimes on their own, according to Christopher Borek, chief assistant district attorney.
In the past year, the task force has also taken on cases of romance scams, check washing, insurance fraud, election fraud, and public corruption, as well as advising officials on ethics issues.
Mr. Hoovler said he intended to assign one more district attorney to the task force while allocating more resources to insurance fraud and organized retail theft this year.
“I believe that we will have more arrests in 2024 because these are very complex cases whose investigations, frankly, take more than a year,” Mr. Moran added.
