An Antelope man has been sentenced to 10 years and 10 months in prison for defrauding trucking companies.
Kulwant Singh Gill, 53, was sentenced Tuesday in Sacramento by U.S. District Judge Lawrence K. Karlton for a scheme to defraud trucking firms out of payments for interstate freight deliveries. Gill was ordered to pay $443,388 in restitution to the victims. He also will be subject to three years of supervised release following his prison term.
Gill pleaded guilty Sept. 22, 2009, to charges involving the scheme in two separate indictments, according to a federal Department of Justice news release.
He owned and operated companies authorized by the Department of Transportation to transport freight loads and to broker the interstate transportation of freight, according to court documents. Officials said Gill used Internet-based "load-posting" boards to find freight loads that were available for transport and offered to transport the loads for a fixed price. He then re-posted those loads on the same or different websites, acting as a broker seeking another trucking company willing to transport the freight.
In more than 300 instances, Gill found trucking companies to deliver the freight, allowed them to make the deliveries and then received payment from the original brokers, who believed Gill had completed the deliveries himself. Gill then refused to pay the trucking companies that actually transported the freight, keeping the money for himself, officials said.
Gill was indicted in 2006, but he continued the scheme while on pretrial release, which led to a 2008 indictment. He was convicted on eight counts of wire fraud and five counts of making false statements to a government agency.
The case resulted from an investigation by the U.S. Department of Transportation, Office of Inspector General.
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