A Wasilla man was sentenced to one year in federal prison Wednesday for scamming people into buying steeply marked-up furniture he falsely claimed was made in Italy.
Dmitry Kudryn, 34, of Wasilla, was convicted on federal wire fraud charges over accusations he purchased hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of wholesale furniture from a Chinese manufacturer in 2014 and then re-sold the furniture on Craigslist as “Italian leather furniture," according to federal prosecutors.
Prosecutors said Kudryn sold sofa sets for about $2,400 each after buying them for less than half that price, and he falsely claimed that each set was worth $4,800 “shipped from the Lower 48.″ He supposedly sold hundreds of sofas that way, including to an investigator from the Department of Homeland Security.
When he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud in the sofa scheme, he also admitted to being involved in another scam in which he repackaged refurbished and promotional Apple products as new using counterfeit packaging and sold them to customers overseas using Amazon and eBay, prosecutors said. Kudryn forfeited $586,748.22 in illicit proceeds from that operation.
Kudryn will have to pay a $100,000 fine and serve a maximum three years of supervised release on top of his federal prison sentence.