U.S. court sentenced Armenian citizen for illegal shipping of luxury vehicles abroad

YEREVAN, OCTOBER 14, ARMENPRESS. Komitas Grigoryan, 30, pleaded guilty in federal court Friday to his role in an ingenious fraud conspiracy that illegally purchased more than $200,000 worth of luxury cars and personal watercraft in Kansas City. As reports “Armenpress” citing The Kansas City Star, Komitas Grigoryan was just 20 feet shy of the Canadian border last February when federal agents in Washington state stopped him on a remote drug-smuggling route. Really, Grigoryan protested, he was unaware that he was wanted in Kansas City on a federal arrest warrant issued two years before.

But why then did he have several driver’s licenses, both genuine and counterfeit, from Colorado and Illinois, and a bogus license from California in the name of “Ruslan Sidorov,” a real Russian exchange student who left the United States almost a decade ago?

Grigoryan, 30, pleaded guilty in federal court Friday to his role in an ingenious fraud conspiracy that illegally purchased more than $200,000 worth of luxury cars and personal watercraft in Kansas City.

The conspiracy, as laid out in federal court records, was designed to get the goods out of reach before any victims realized they had been conned.

Between February and September 2010, Grigoryan and two co-conspirators rented apartments and office space in Kansas City and used the addresses to create sham businesses. They fabricated paperwork showing those businesses paying handsome incomes to the filched identity of the Russian exchange student.

Thus prepared, the conspirators trolled luxury-car lots, eventually obtained credit and then purchased two 2010 Lexus RX350s, a 2006 Mercedes CLS500 and a 2007 Audi Q7. They also picked up two personal watercraft and a trailer, also on credit.

They packed all the merchandise on container ships and made enough loan payments to give the ships time to get out of port. By the time the finance companies noticed that the loans had defaulted, the cars and watercraft had been off-loaded at a Russian port, too far away for domestic repo men.

Like Grigoryan, the other defendants have proved slippery to corral.

One 50-year-old defendant never has been arrested, likely because of the conspirators’ ability to create false identities.

“The investigation of this matter has shown that the defendants have access to counterfeit forms of identification, including driver’s licenses and passports,” one court filing noted.

But authorities had their hands on Artur Galstyan, 36, at least for a while.

The Kansas Highway Patrol snapped him up in September 2010, about a month after the last cars had shipped out of New York. Galstyan pleaded guilty in federal court in Kansas City and was sentenced to 27 months in prison.

But before he was scheduled to surrender to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons in June 2012, he simply vanished, much like the cars and watercraft he and the others had purchased in Kansas City two years before.

Galstyan lives in Armenia now, authorities said.