A Chinese national who was residing illegally in Los Angeles has been sentenced to eight years in prison for serving as a courier in a fraud scheme that targeted elderly Americans.

He Xiangyang, 41, was sentenced in U.S. District Court in Dayton, Ohio, for conspiring to commit wire and bank fraud, a charge to which he pleaded guilty in November 2024, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Ohio announced on Feb. 24.

The scheme defrauded more than $9.5 million from “various unsuspecting senior citizen victims’ personal bank accounts and retirement funds located in at least 14 states,” according to the indictment.

Under the scheme, He personally collected more than $500,000 in cash and gold from victims while acting as a courier, prosecutors said.

“Retired Americans unknowingly give away their hard-earned retirement savings to criminals like He, an illegal alien who preyed on a vulnerable population,” Dominick S. Gerace II, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Ohio, said in a statement.

“This sort of conspiracy uses deceptive tactics and fear to steal millions of dollars in savings and retirement accounts from hardworking Americans. My office will do everything we can to protect our elderly citizens.”

Victims of such fraud schemes are usually contacted via computer message or unsolicited phone call by individuals posing as employees or customer service representatives of legitimate companies, such as Microsoft and Amazon, according to a sentencing memorandum filed by prosecutors on Feb. 23.

Victims are then transferred to someone posing as a “security official” or “government employee,” who claimed the victims’ IP addresses or financial accounts had been compromised or linked to criminal activity, prosecutors said.

To gain victims’ trust, scammers provide fake company employee identification numbers and the names of real government officials. In the sentencing memorandum, prosecutors named the Federal Trade Commission as one of the government agencies the scammers claimed to represent.

“Conspirators then threaten these victims who have little or no experience with the criminal justice system with arrest warrants and seizure of their life savings if they do not cooperate with the investigation,” prosecutors wrote.

“While under the stress of fictitious criminal exposure, conspirators convince victims the only way to ‘cleanse’ or ‘detangle’ their funds from the international criminal activity is to withdraw their life savings and put them in ‘secure’ government accounts.”

The fraud would often continue until scammers learned that victims had “very little money left in their accounts,” after which they cut off communication, according to the sentencing memorandum.

Prosecutors also detailed the victims He encountered during the scheme in the sentencing memorandum.

He made his first pickup from a 75-year-old male victim in Orem, Utah, in February 2024.

From late February until early April 2024, He traveled to six different states, including New York, Utah, Minnesota, and Florida, to pick up 17 packages from victims who were 65 or older. The packages included $35,000 to $73,000 in cash or gold.

On April 4, 2024, He traveled to Ohio to pick up funds from a victim and was later arrested.

“At the time of his arrest, He told agents that he was in the area looking for construction work, which was clearly not true, indicating he knew the wrongfulness of his actions,” prosecutors wrote in the sentencing memorandum.

Prosecutors said He took part in the scheme to “financially support himself and his family” and recommended the court to sentence the defendant to at least 51 months in prison.

His lawyer, in a sentencing memorandum filed in March 2025, told the court that his client “was not aware of the full scope of the conspiracy” and should not be sentenced to more than 51 months in prison.

“Mr. He understands that his actions were wrong and regrets that victims were financially harmed due to his involvement in illegal activity,” the lawyer wrote.

The Epoch Times contacted He’s lawyer but didn’t receive a response by publication time.