Judge: Mississippi man must pay $1.6 million for bank fraud, sentenced to prison
Published 8:50 am Wednesday, October 7, 2020
A Mississippi man convicted of bank fraud for inflating the cost of trucks he was buying to get extra money from lenders has been sentenced to prison and ordered to pay more than $1 million in restitution.
Louis Joseph Normand, Jr., 60, of Diamondhead, was sentenced by a federal judge on Tuesday to nearly five years in prison followed by five years of supervised release, according to an announcement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Mississippi.
Normand was also ordered to pay $1.6 million in restitution. He pleaded guilty to a criminal information charge of bank fraud in July.
Prosecutors said a local bank and private lenders had agreed to lend Normand 80% of the purchase price for “well over” 100 trucks he was buying for resale.
He was accused of then creating false invoices inflating the sales price to increase the amount of the loan and decrease his down payment, prosecutors said. He was lent nearly $5 million — about 130% of the actual purchase price.