A key organizer of a $36 million transnational fraud ring that posed as attorneys to swindle elderly Americans out of timeshare “settlement” money pleaded guilty September 14 to conspiracy to commit money laundering, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of California announced. Juliet Mora, 42, formerly of Hayward, California and now living in Nicaragua, admitted to helping run a scheme that stole from more than 400 mostly elderly American victims.
According to court documents, members of the organization posed as attorneys and contacted elderly timeshare owners and past fraud victims, telling them they were entitled to restitution or settlement payments. Believing they were dealing with real lawyers, victims signed fake representation agreements and bogus non-disclosure agreements, then paid fees and wired money to shell companies the organization’s U.S.-based members controlled. Members allegedly evaded banks’ anti-money-laundering safeguards by misrepresenting what the transactions were for, repeatedly closing and reopening accounts flagged for suspicious activity.
Mora joined the scheme in August 2021, prosecutors said, maintaining shell companies that took in more than $1.5 million in victim funds; investigators traced roughly $2.7 million in stolen funds to accounts she controlled. She later relocated to Nicaragua and became an organizer, directing U.S.-based co-conspirators on receiving and moving victim money, setting up shell companies, and preparing fraudulent legal paperwork, and used fake paralegal identities to communicate with victims directly. She was arrested in December 2025 after arriving at Boston Logan International Airport on a flight from Panama, on a second superseding indictment. She faces up to 20 years in prison and a fine of up to $500,000 or twice the amount laundered, whichever is greater, when sentenced December 14 by U.S. District Judge Jennifer L. Thurston.
The plea is the latest development in a case that has played out across several countries over the past year. The scheme first became public in October 2025, when the Eastern District’s U.S. Attorney’s Office, in a case federal investigators dubbed “Operation Silver Shores,” announced the indictment of more than 20 people and the arrest of 15 defendants across California, Texas, and Florida. At that point, investigators had identified at least 372 victims and losses exceeding $30 million, with more than $1.5 million in victim funds seized. FBI Sacramento Special Agent in Charge Sid Patel said at the time that some of the arrested defendants were tied to Norteño-affiliated gang members moving into organized financial crime; local reporting on the arrests, including by the San Joaquin Valley Sun, named several Central Valley defendants taken into custody that day.
Both the September plea agreement and the original indictment describe the fraud’s reach extending well beyond U.S. borders. Investigators say the organization operated “out of the United States and several countries in Latin America.” According to Tuesday’s release, Nicaraguan authorities, coordinating with the U.S. State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service, arrested one of the case’s central figures, Marlon Solis Bonilla, in July 2025 and transferred him to FBI custody in Houston. And in August 2026, Mexican authorities arrested three more defendants, Julian Jauregui, Sergio Jauregui, and Eduardo Navarro, in Guadalajara, an operation the release credits to the FBI’s legal attaché office in Mexico City working with the U.S. Marshals Service and Jalisco state security forces; all three were processed by Mexican immigration authorities and removed to the United States. Mexican outlet Crónica separately reported that Jalisco’s cybercrime police, working from a U.S. Marshals tip, captured three men with the same first names in coordinated raids in Guadalajara and Zapopan in early September, describing the outstanding October 2025 California warrants as involving cryptocurrency-related wire fraud and money laundering — a somewhat different characterization of the underlying conduct than the elderly-timeshare fraud described in the DOJ release, which readers should note. Three defendants in the case remain at large, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
The case adds to a rapidly growing list of federal actions this year against transnational networks that use fake attorneys and phony government officials to target elderly Americans, particularly former timeshare owners. In August 2026, the Justice Department and FBI announced a much larger set of indictments against leaders of Mexico’s Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), accusing cartel-linked call centers of defrauding more than 6,000 Americans out of roughly $400 million between 2019 and 2023 through fake timeshare resale and settlement schemes, according to Fox News‘ coverage of the announcement. FBI Director Kash Patel said at that press conference that the bureau had carried out more than 30 international transfers of custody across 15 countries in July 2026 alone as part of its broader elder-fraud enforcement push. There is no indication in the available court filings or press materials that the CJNG-linked case and the Mora/Operation Silver Shores case are the same organization, but both illustrate a pattern federal officials say has become common: elder-fraud networks that blend U.S.-based money-laundering cells with leadership and call-center operations based in Mexico and Central America.
The Mora investigation was conducted by the FBI, IRS Criminal Investigation, and the Bakersfield Police Department, with assistance from the U.S. Postal Inspection Service and the Truckee Police Department. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Cody S. Chapple and Arelis M. Clemente are prosecuting the case.