Michael Bennett, a former NFL player with the Minnesota Vikings and Oakland Raiders, received 15 months at ClubFed last week. Mr. Bennett got involved with a fraud scheme that was tangential to an identity theft/tax refund scheme.
Mr. Bennett went to a check cashing store–a sting operation set up by the FBI–and asked for a loan showing $9 million of collateral in a bank account with UBS. The account was actually empty, and that’s fraud. Mr. Bennett pleaded guilty to that; as his attorney correctly told the Associated Press, Mr. Bennett, “had nothing to do with cashing fraudulent tax checks, nor was he charged with such.” The other defendants in the case (as noted when I first wrote about this story) are charged with those offenses.
Unfortunately for Mr. Bennett, he’ll still get to enjoy ClubFed for fifteen months.
