For more than a year beginning in late 2009, Kyle Isamu Hamatake must have thought he'd devised the perfect Internet scam in Southern California.
The Orange County man published online employment advertisements seeking drivers for sex industry escorts, tricked the individuals into making cash deposits at MoneyGram accounts and then stole the funds.
Federal prosecutors determined that Hamatake–who was born in 1982 and has been a resident in the city of Orange and Palmdale–didn't employ any escorts in his illegal wire fraud scheme.
The defendant begged to avoid prison and the government's punishment stance is unclear because prosecutors mysteriously sealed their report from public inspection.
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CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.