APReading: 1 min.
An 82-year-old Colorado man was charged Wednesday with selling and trading fake Michael Jordan cards in a scheme that prosecutors say netted him more than $800,000 over four years.
May Gilbert McNeil was arrested in Denver, where he lives, after a complaint was unsealed in Brooklyn federal court charging him with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, according to the Brooklyn US attorney’s office.
McNeil was accused of conducting numerous fraudulent transactions beginning in 2015, including the 2019 sale of a counterfeit card to a victim in Manhasset, New York, for $4,500 and a 2017 transaction in which he allegedly exchanged two counterfeit cards for two footballs. Authentic Tom Brady football.
“Mr. McNeil defrauded sports memorabilia collectors out of more than $800,000 by intentionally misrepresenting the authenticity of the trading cards he was selling when, in fact, they were fake,” said Michael Driscoll, deputy director in charge of the local office of the FBI in New York, in a press release.
McNeil was scheduled to make an initial appearance in the US District Court in Colorado on Wednesday and appear in a New York courtroom at a later date, prosecutors said. It was not clear from the federal court documents whether McNeil is represented by an attorney. No one answered a call to his Denver home.
