Florida Man Returns to Federal Prison for N95 Mask Scheme

A Florida man who participated in a scheme to defraud a Cedar Rapids, Iowa, company in 2020 was sentenced on December 9, 2024, to more than three years in federal prison.

Saransh "Sam" Sharma, age 44, from Wellington, Florida, originally from Muscat, Oman, received the prison term after a December 14, 2023, guilty plea to one count of wire fraud.

At his guilty plea and sentencing hearings, Sharma admitted that a Cedar Rapids company was in the market to purchase one million 3M N95 masks in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. On October 9, 2020, Sharma falsely represented to the Cedar Rapids company in a phone call that a Florida limited liability company had successfully transacted on 30 million masks in the prior two months when, in truth, the Florida company had not done so. The Cedar Rapids company wired over $3 million to a Florida lawyer's bank account on October 19, 2020, expecting to receive the one million N95 masks, but the Cedar Rapids company never received them. The United States later filed a civil fraud action and recovered approximately $2.4 million of the Cedar Rapids company's moneys.

In March 2018, Sharma was sentenced to 33 months' imprisonment after he pled guilty to one count of wire fraud in the Northern District of California for his role in a different scheme. Sharma's prior federal prison sentence was discharged on October 9, 2020.

Sharma was sentenced in Cedar Rapids by United States District Court Chief Judge C.J. Williams. Sharma was sentenced to 37 months' imprisonment. He was ordered to make $390,454.57 in restitution victims of the N95 mask scheme. He must also serve a three-year term of supervised release after the prison term. There is no parole in the federal system.

The case was prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorney Timothy L. Vavricek and investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Office of Inspector General.

Court file information at https://ecf.iand.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/login.pl.

The case file number is 23-CR-71.

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