BOSTON, December 5, 2016—A suspended attorney is expected to be in court today to face charges that he stole funds from clients and opened credit cards in the names of colleagues in order to fund an extravagant lifestyle, including gambling and luxury apartments and vehicles, Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel F. Conley said.
WASSEM AMIN (D.O.B. 2/27/85) is expected to be arraigned in Suffolk Superior Court tomorrow after a grand jury indicted him last month on 26 charges. Amin is charged with:
- Six counts of credit card application fraud,
- Five counts of committing consumer credit violations,
- Four counts of larceny over $250,
- Three counts of witness intimidation,
- Larceny over $250 by scheme,
- Money laundering,
- Attempted larceny,
- Forgery by check,
- Uttering by check,
- Common law forgery
- Common law uttering,
- And publishing a false statement of financial condition.
According to prosecutors, Amin, who was accepted into legal practice in 2012 and administratively suspended from practice earlier this year, started a practice known as Amin Legal Group last year and lured a college acquaintance along with a law school intern to join the firm. According to prosecutors, Amin opened several lines of credit in the victims’ names without their knowledge or consent and used them to charge expenses totaling nearly $35,000. Amin allegedly threatened one victim by text message after learning that the victim had filed a complaint against him with the Board of Bar Overseers.
Amin is charged with embezzling nearly $50,000 from a client who was in the process of launching a business. The victim wired the funds to Amin with the expectation that they would be transferred into an account Amin claimed he had created in the name of the new company. Amin instead transferred the funds into his corporate accounts and used the majority of the money to pre-pay a lease for a Mercedes S-class sedan, prosecutors said. In response to the victim’s repeated demands for the return of the money, Amin wrote a check on an account that had been closed two months earlier.
Amin is also accused of charging expenses totaling $9,000 to the credit card of another client. The charges were not related to any legal services.
Additional indictments charge Amin for securing the lease for a $10,819/month Canal Street penthouse apartment by providing false information, then failing to pay rent; fraudulently inducing a classmate to co-sign a student loan during 2011; altering a paycheck from a former employer in an attempt to steal more than $22,000 from the company; and writing bad checks to defraud two banks.
Assistant District Attorney Michele Granda, chief of the DA’s Special Prosecutions Unit, led the grand jury proceedings resulting in indictments. Amin is expected to be arraigned tomorrow in the Magistrate’s Session of Suffolk Superior Court.
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All defendants are presumed innocent until and unless proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
