Two men have been sentenced for scamming truckers out of millions of dollars by falsely posing as brokers.


Viacheslav Berkovich of Los Angeles was sentenced to 55 months in federal prison this week and was ordered to pay $2.77 million in restitution to the 300 victims of the scheme by U.S. District Judge John Walter.

His codefendant, Nicholas Lakes of Glendale, Calif., received a six-year sentence a few weeks ago. Both men pleaded guilty in February to computer fraud and mail fraud charges.

For more than three years, Lakes and Berkovich repeatedly hacked www.Safersys.org, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's system that maintains a list of licensed interstate trucking companies and brokers. They would temporarily change the contact information for a legitimate trucking company to their own. Then they would advertise cargo on Web-based load boards. There, the two would broker the load out to an owner-operator or other trucking company.

Once the cargo was delivered, the men pocketed the funds. The trucker who actually transported the load was left empty-handed, and would find that the company they thought they had contracted with didn't know a thing about it.

As an example of a fraudulent transaction, in January 2008, Lakes and Berkovich accessed the Internet Truckstop "loadboard" and obtained information about a trucking load being brokered by Dallas-based Stevens Transport. Using the name of Vega Trucking, one of the fictitious companies they had registered on the SAFER website, Lakes and Berkovich agreed with Stevens Transport to transport the load for $3,400. Lakes and Berkovich then used the name of Barkfelt Transport, a fraudulent trucking brokerage, to double-broker the load by hiring victim RK Trucking to transport the load for $4,000. RK Trucking transported the load, but never got paid for its work. Lakes and Berkovich, however, received a $3,390 check in the mail from Stevens Transport.

Judge Walter set up a tentative restitution amount of $2.77 million, which will be finalized once the court considers additional submissions from attorneys in the case. The government has already recovered $1.4 million from Lakes.

The case was brought against the men by the Department of Transportation, Office of the Inspector General.