A federal judge in White Plains, New York, closed the books on a sweepstakes operation that spent a decade working the same trick on retirees: call a stranger, tell them they had already won, and collect the “fees” before any prize could ship. The scheme ran phone banks and text campaigns out of Jamaica for more than ten years before investigators traced the money back to one of its leaders. What arrived at sentencing was not a warning letter but an eight-figure case file, an eight-year prison term, and a forfeiture order running into the millions.
A Sentencing That Closes a Decade-Long Fraud
Jordan Trought, 31, a citizen of Jamaica, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Vincent Briccetti to eight years in prison and ordered to forfeit $6,166,227 for his role as a high-ranking leader of the operation. According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, the ring stole more than $9 million from more than 200 elderly victims in the United States from at least 2015 through at least 2025.
Court filings refer to the operation as the “Elder Fraud Scheme,” a name that reflects who it was built to reach. Trought ran his share of it from Jamaica alongside co-conspirators based in both Jamaica and the United States, according to the same release, coordinating calls and payment instructions from outside the reach of the victims he was contacting.
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The Alias Behind Every Call: “David Miller”
The scheme’s opening move was the same each time. Victims received an unsolicited phone call or text from someone using a common alias, most often “David Miller,” claiming they had won a life-changing amount of money and a luxury car from a well-known marketing and sweepstakes company, but that taxes or fees had to be paid first, to addresses and accounts the caller specified.
Once a victim sent that first payment, the caller did not disappear. Investigators say the caller remained in contact, informing the victim that additional payments were needed before the winnings could be released — turning a single lie into a relationship that, in some cases, extended over months and repeated withdrawals.
Checks, Money Orders, Zelle and Venmo: Where the Money Went
Prosecutors laid out exactly how victims were told to pay. According to the announcement of Trought’s guilty plea, victims were instructed to send money by mailing checks, money orders and cash, as well as by wire, Zelle and Venmo transfer, to addresses and accounts identified by the caller. Trought and his co-conspirators also gained control of some victims’ bank accounts and used that access to move money out of and through those accounts, ultimately routing funds to associates and to an automobile business Trought operated in Jamaica.
The mix of payment types was not incidental. The Federal Trade Commission’s consumer guidance on prize scams notes that scammers insist on wiring money, using a payment app such as Zelle or Venmo, sending cash, or paying with a gift card because those channels are hard to trace and hard to reverse once the money has moved, unlike a credit card charge a bank can often claw back. A mailed check can sometimes still be stopped in the day or two after it goes out; once it clears, or once a wire or app transfer lands, the money is effectively gone.
A Four-Year Stretch Worth More Than $6 Million
Trought did not build the ring; he joined it. He came aboard in or around March 2021 and rose to become one of its leaders, according to the sentencing release, and prosecutors held him personally responsible for the portion of the fraud committed after that point: more than $6 million taken from more than 100 victims between March 2021 and his arrest in August 2025. That narrower figure is why his own forfeiture order, $6,166,227, sits close to but below the ring’s total reported loss of more than $9 million — it reflects the stretch of the scheme prosecutors could tie directly to him.
The guilty-plea announcement also records that Trought agreed to pay restitution in that identical amount, $6,166,227, separate from the forfeiture. Forfeiture and restitution serve different purposes: forfeiture strips a defendant of property connected to the crime, while restitution is a court-ordered obligation meant to repay victims. Neither guarantees the more than 200 households in this case will see money returned; the release does not describe a distribution to victims, only the two dollar-for-dollar orders against Trought.
Extradition, a Guilty Plea and Three Federal Prosecutors
Trought was arrested in Jamaica on August 28, 2025, and extradited to the United States on October 22, 2025. In June 2026, he pleaded guilty before U.S. Magistrate Judge Judith C. McCarthy to a single count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, mail fraud and bank fraud. The case was handled by the Southern District of New York’s White Plains Division, with Assistant U.S. Attorneys Benjamin Levander, Margaret Vasu and Ioannis Drivas in charge of the prosecution, and with investigative work credited to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, IRS Criminal Investigation, the U.S. Marshals Service, the Justice Department’s Office of International Affairs and Jamaican authorities, including the Jamaican Constabulary Force.
Announcing the sentence, U.S. Attorney Jamie McDonald said the case “reflects the seriousness of schemes that deliberately target elderly victims and strip them of their financial security,” adding that Trought “defrauded hundreds of elderly victims out of millions of dollars, taking advantage of their age to rob them of their hard-earned life savings.”
After the Money Leaves
Neither the prison sentence nor the forfeiture order arrived in time to stop money from leaving any of the more than 200 households tied to this case; both came years after the calls started. A family that catches a scam call in progress, or spots a strange Zelle request sent from a parent’s phone, has minutes to act, not the years a federal prosecution takes to resolve. Freezing an account, alerting a bank and writing down exactly what was sent are steps a household needs to know before money moves, not after.
The Senior Fraud Defense & First-Hour Recovery Kit is a 9-page kit built around a first-hour recovery plan, a family code word for verifying suspicious calls, and a fraud evidence and report log.
See the first-hour recovery plan and the family code word in The Senior Fraud Defense & First-Hour Recovery Kit.
AI-assisted research and drafting; reviewed by an editor.
