Prosecutors: Industry’s Mystery Fraudster Spent Money on Lavish Lifestyle

The suspect in the small business finance industry’s long running mysterious fraud was living large before being arrested in Spain and extradited to the United States. Saul Shalev has been charged with wire fraud, money laundering, and aggravated identity theft for stealing the identities of merchants, setting up fake loan brokerages, and tricking business owners and funders into funding his personal bank accounts. When the American authorities finally caught up with him, he had been residing in Dubai but vacationing at the Hotel Nobu Barcelona inside a country with an extradition treaty with the United States. That’s where they got him and his laptop with all the evidence.

According to the US Attorney, Shalev rented a Dubai apartment for $18,000/month, was photographed with a $250,000 McLaren 650S, rented yachts, and paid for chauffeured limousines in Paris. Shalev is currently 36 years old. He had been a fugitive from justice even before these charges. He fled the US in 2019 with three pending warrants against him in New Jersey and New York. His fraud scheme against the industry was carried out from abroad.

His alleged fake ISOs include the names Silver Oak Capital Funding, LEM Enterprises, and SpBiz. Authorities obtained a spreadsheet of 27 funders he had compiled on his computer that noted which ones he had already signed up with or “used and abused.”

Shalev is said to have determined which merchants had small business loans and the approximate date in which the loans were obtained through basic public UCC filing data. That was enough to contact those merchants and pretend to be their lender of record and initiate the first step of each scam.

In total, prosecutors believe Shalev fraudulently obtained over $4 million from merchants and funders.

Shalev has made a request to be moved from jail to home detention. Prosecutors have argued, however, that he is a classic case of an imminent flight risk because his dramatic overseas capture was a result of him having fled the law already

“If Shalev is released and flees the country again, it is very unlikely that the many small business owners and employees who suffered as a result of his criminal conduct will ever see justice,” they wrote.