NONPRECEDENTIAL DISPOSITION To be cited only in accordance with Fed. R. App. P. 32.1 United States Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit Chicago, Illinois 60604 Argued July 5, 2018 Decided August 20, 2018 Before DIANE P. WOOD, Chief Judge MICHAEL Y. SCUDDER, Circuit Judge AMY J. ST. EVE, Circuit Judge No. 17‐3638 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Appeal from the United States District Plaintiff‐Appellee, Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin. v. No. 17‐CR‐94‐1‐JPS MANISH B. PATEL, Defendant‐Appellant. J.P. Stadtmueller, Judge. O R D E R Manish Patel thought that he had found a way to have large amounts of money fall into his lap: through a scheme in which callers pretending to be government officials tricked victims into transferring funds to fictitious entities across the United States. Equipped with fake identification cards, Patel and his wife drove across the country collecting the money, keeping a share of it, and depositing the rest into various bank accounts. The law finally caught up with him, however, and he ultimately pleaded guilty to violating 18 U.S.C. § 1343, the wire fraud statute. Although the district court sentenced him to a below‐Guidelines prison term of 38 months, Patel now contends on appeal that the sentence is too high. He argues that the court should have given him a minor‐role reduction, that it should not have imposed a two‐level upward adjustment No. 17‐3638 Page 2 based on the substantial activity that took place outside the United States, and that it should have paid more attention to his primary mitigating arguments. Finding no error in any of those respects, we affirm. I For more than seven months, Patel and his wife cruised around the United States picking up MoneyGram orders (i.e. electronic money transfers) that had been sent from the victims to fictitious people. The masterminds of the scheme were based in India; their identity appears to be unknown. Someone would call a potential victim and tell the person that he or she owed money—sometimes thousands of dollars—to the Internal Revenue Service. The caller would then tell the victim that arrest could be averted if he or she made a down payment on the alleged debt. Unfortunately, a significant number of people fell for the scam. They wired funds as instructed, and then Patel and his wife, using ID cards bearing Patel’s photo but other people’s names, collected the payments. They deposited most of the money into various bank accounts for the organizers of the scheme, and they kept 4% for themselves. As Patel admitted in his written plea agreement, from September 2016 to May 2017, he used at least 130 fake IDs to pick up over $1 million, in more than 1,000 transactions. Patel’s plea agreement also addressed sentencing. It acknowledged that the government would seek a two‐level increase over his basic Guidelines level under U.S.S.G. § 2B1.1(b)(10) “(A) or (B),” because “a substantial part of the fraudulent scheme was committed from outside of the United States or the offense otherwise involved sophisticated means ...
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