A 39-year-old Florissant man identified as Richard Lind was arrested on Wednesday, May 21. He has been accused of scamming more than $250,000 from a grocery chain. While he was charged with five counts of wire fraud on April 22, he appeared in court on Wednesday but didn’t admit to the crime.
According to a press release from the Eastern District of Missouri’s Attorney’s Office, the charges against Richard Lind allege that he served as the site manager for a logistics firm at the grocer’s distribution center. The defendant’s manager provided the physical labor and heavy equipment to empty the motors that contained the grocer’s inventory and software for tracking shipments.
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The indictment alleges that Lind scammed the grocery chain by fabricating records for inventory deliveries that never occurred and generating fake invoices to bill trucking companies for unloading non-existent shipments. However, the trucking companies would then ask for reimbursement from the grocery chain. On the other hand, Lind also annulled the false records to hide his plan from his employer.
Per the note on justice. gov, the defendant used electronic authorization codes as part of the scheme to collect cash at truck stops, resulting in more than 600 fraudulent transactions totaling over $250,000. The Assistant U.S. Attorney, Gwen Carroll, is prosecuting the case investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
It is worth noting that charges marked in the indictment are merely accusations and are not touted as proof of guilt. Every defendant is presumed to be innocent until proven guilty.
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As the news surfaced online, the scam left people shocked, and they shared their thoughts. A user said, “Smart man. What a scheme. I couldn’t do that, too complicated,” while another user said, “Always remember: There isn’t a scheme in this world that hasn’t sent people to jail.”
In other news, Ramon Heriberto Cerda Jr., a 41-year-old U.S. Border Patrol agent, was admitted to scamming the U.S. government by dedicating his official work hours to running a personal business. He had a business, El Eagle Mail, where he worked while receiving his biweekly government paychecks.
The matter was validated after the FBI installed two CCTV cameras to observe his activities. One camera recorded the view from his residence, while the other captured his business, which was located a few minutes away. The surveillance footage captured between April 22 and June 28, 2025, showed that the agent was at his residence until nearly 2 p.m. on weekdays before visiting his business, where he remained until 4 p.m.
During the same period, he also submitted his biweekly timecards, claiming he worked for the USBP from 6 a.m. to 4 p.m., logging 399.58 hours between April 22 and June 28, 2025. He was reportedly paid nearly $17,724.74 for those claimed hours.
In addition to the CCTV footage, the FBI also found location data for both the agent’s government-issued phone and his personal phone, which corroborated his fraud.
