On January 26, 2026, federal attorney John P. Heekin from the Northern District of Florida and FBI agent Jason Carley announced that 23-year-old Indian national Atharva Shailesh Sathawane was sentenced to 18 years in prison following his conviction on November 18, 2025 for his role as a money mule for a PayPal refund scam operation that stole at least $15 million from at least 28 elderly victims in the state of Florida.
The general modus operandi with the scam is simple:
- The scammers, based in India, would call their victims under the false personation of PayPal employees and falsely claim that $100 was accidentally sent to their PayPal account, demanding that the victim pay the $100 back.
- When the money is paid back, the scammers will then falsely claim $10,000 was sent to the victim’s account, and that they needed to pay the money back by converting it to cryptocurrency at a Bitcoin ATM.
- Once the crypto is paid, the scammers will then claim $200,000 was sent to their victims’ account, and that they needed to pay it back in the form of gold bars in order to “avoid paying taxes.”
- Sathawane, who was illegally residing in South Florida after overstaying his student visa, was tasked with travelling to each victim to obtain large quantities of cash and gold from the victims and then delivering these proceeds to his co-conspirators in India.
Sathawane was arrested by the Gainesville Police Department in Georgia as part of a sting operation conducted at the residence of 84-year-old victim Brian Oliver, who in the week prior to the arrest had given Sathawane a cardboard box containing 68 gold coins worth roughly $200,000.