Guilty Plea Entered in California Debt Collection Scam Case

A U.S. Attorney in California announced Friday that a man arrested in connection with a large debt collection scam has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud.

Darrian Jeffrey Summers (photo from CA Deparment of Corrections via BakersfieldNow.com)

According to the plea agreement with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Fresno, Darrian Jeffrey Summers of Taft, Calif., was a salesman for Maxwell, Turner and Associates Inc. (MTA) in Bakersfield, a company that purported to be a debt collection agency. When MTA collected money from debtors, they would not send the money to their clients. MTA would also tell clients that additional fees were needed to advance the litigation process, although no litigation was actually taking place.

Summers admitted that the losses to clients ranged from $1.6 million to $1.7 million.

Summers agreed to forfeit any claim he had to $919,419 in cash seized in December 2010 when he was arrested.  He is scheduled to appear in late August for sentencing, where he faces as much as 20 years in jail and fines of up to $250,000.

The case was brought as a result of an ongoing investigation between the IRS, Bakersfield Police Department, and the Kern County District Attorney’s Office.

Before the raid in December of last year, Maxwell, Turner and Associates had issued several press releases to ARM industry press — including insideARM.com — announcing, among other things, an entry into debt buying and the launch of a new Web site. The company’s Web site is now defunct and the company remains unreachable.