The owner of an Orlando construction company has been sentenced to more than two years in federal prison for her involvement in a multi-million-dollar wire fraud scheme.
On Monday, November 4, U.S. District Judge William F. Jung sentenced 48-year-old Wendy Cudemo-Gamez to 27 months behind bars for conspiracy to commit wire fraud. She was also ordered to forfeit a total of $787,911, along with a real property located in Palmetto, Florida.
Cudemo-Gamez pleaded guilty on Tuesday, July 16.
According to court records, Cudemo-Gamez registered a construction company that she owned with the State of Florida in May of 2021. The company claimed to provide construction services and labor for construction site contractors and subcontractors.
In order to comply with state laws, Cudemo-Gamez’s company was required to secure and maintain adequate worker’s compensation insurance coverage. Providers of such insurance based the premiums that they charged and the amount of coverage they provided on the number of employees that a company had and the total annual payroll of those employees.
Cudemo-Gamez’s company had agreements with contractors and subcontractors to use workers, which were purported to be her employees, at construction sites. However, these workers were often “undocumented aliens” who were actually working for, and under, the daily supervision and direction of the contractors.
Court records show that Cudemo-Gamez, or others on behalf of her company, would then regularly receive “payroll checks” from contractors that were cashed at various financial institutions to pay her “employees” and to cover the cost of other expenses.
Over an unspecified period of time, Cudemo-Gamez falsely and fraudulently stated in insurance applications that her company had a “very limited payroll,” as well as a “very limited number of employees who worked on construction jobsites.”
In addition, Cudemo-Gamez made false claims to numerous contractors via wire communications that her employees had full worker’s compensation coverage.
In reality, Cudemo-Gamez’s company received and cashed more than $7.8 million in checks from multiple construction contractors. These payroll figures far exceeded the “very limited” payroll figures that Cudemo-Gamez had reported to her worker’s compensation insurance company.
As a result, the “employees” of Cudemo-Gamez’s company, which were actually the employees of other entities, performed work on jobsites without adequate insurance coverage. In addition, the insurers also lost revenue for insurance premiums that they would have charged if they had been aware of the actual number of workers requiring coverage.
Cudemo-Gamez’s company also failed to ensure that its workers were legally authorized to work in the country and that required state and federal payroll taxes were being paid for these workers. The contractors who actually paid these workers’ wages and used their services were able to avoid responsibility for those duties as well.
This case was investigated by Homeland Security Investigations and the State of Florida Department of Financial Services. It was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Jay L. Hoffer.