Twin Cities ‘serial fraudster’ given 7 years in prison for cheating business out of $1.2M

A Twin Cities man with a long history of financial scheming has been sentenced to seven years in prison for defrauding an electronics manufacturing business.

Thomas Thanh Pham, 53, of Burnsville was “a serial fraudster who has demonstrated that he will not stop until he is stopped,” read a post-sentencing statement Monday from Acting U.S. Attorney Joseph H. Thompson.

U.S. District Judge Joan Ericksen, in handing down the sentence for wire fraud that includes three years of supervised release, said that Pham has “proven [himself] to be an efficient and effective perpetrator of fraud” whose crime was “part of a skilled execution of a scheme that he has refined over decades.”

Defense attorney Hillary Parsons argued in a court filing for a sentence of no more than 4¾ years in prison, pointing out that a “sentence in this range will allow him to start paying restitution to his victim much sooner.”

According to court documents:

Pham, as CEO of Enterprise Products, purported to provide consulting and financial services to commercial clients involved in engineering and manufacturing.

He presented himself as a broker with supposed business relationships with large, well-known companies and claimed he could arrange service agreements between an electronic manufacturing services company based in San Jose — not identified in public court records — and business affiliates in the electronics and technology sectors.

In June 2019, Pham proposed that Enterprise Products could facilitate multimillion-dollar contracts with large companies such as RetailNext, Siemens and Texas Instruments.

Pham supplied his client with bogus documents, including fabricated contracts, correspondence and business proposals. Pham required that his client pay a “deposit bond” of $1.278 million on a pledge that the company would gain millions of dollars in repair service business including $38 million in a deal with RetailNext, a global provider of analytics to brick-and-mortar retailers.

In support of the scheme, Pham arranged the delivery to his client of about 20 samples of electronic devices that supposedly required repairs. However, Pham covered up that the samples had been stolen.

Pham received his first criminal conviction 32 years ago. Since that time, he has been convicted of numerous fraud offenses related to buying cars and forging checks.

He also was convicted in Texas for making fraudulent computer orders in the early 2000s on behalf of a company he falsely purported to represent. He cheated that company out of $1.9 million.

Ahead of this week’s sentencing, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minnesota told the court in writing that the Texas case bore “a striking resemblance to his most recent brazen and manipulative scheme.”