A former Buffalo man who scammed banks out of hundreds of thousands of dollars with claims based on phony disputed transactions has pleaded guilty to bank fraud, U.S. Attorney Trini E. Ross said.

Joshua Parra, 32, who now lives in Melbourne, Fla., faces a maximum penalty of 30 years in prison and a $1 million fine when he returns for sentencing before U.S. Magistrate Judge Michael J. Roemer.

Prosecutors said that, between that Dec. 28, 2021, and Jan. 6, 2022, Parra invented 94 fictitious disputed transactions, nearly all of them for $5,000, in the names of 11 customers of Fintech Company One, which offers mobile banking services to its customers.

According to prosecutors, two banks, Bancorp and Stride Bank, transferred a total of about $459,000 from settlement accounts to the 11 customer accounts Parra was using. Investigators from the Internal Revenue Service and the FBI determined that there were no transactions that supported the disputes in any of the customer accounts.

Email [email protected].

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