‘B-girl’ ring uncovered in South Beach

RIGA - Seventeen men and women, including some from Latvia and Estonia, have been charged in Miami Beach, Florida, in what U.S. authorities say was an elaborate scheme to bilk rich male patrons of private night clubs by getting them to pay exorbitant prices for drinks, reports Latvians Online. At least 88 tourists became victims of the scheme that involved Eastern European “bar girls,” or “B-girls,” luring them to private clubs. Once in the clubs, the men were tricked into paying dramatically inflated prices for drinks.

In one case, a victim had to pay 5,000 dollars for a bottle of champagne. In another, a man from Philadelphia was defrauded of 43,000 dollars, which included him waking up in his hotel room with an unknown painting he apparently had purchased the night before.

In an early morning raid on clubs in Miami’s South Beach district, authorities arrested 16 alleged conspirators and “B-girls.” The alleged ringleader, 44-year-old Alec Simchuk, is believed to have fled the United States.
Listed with Simchuk as conspirators and investors in the criminal organization that ran the scheme are Svetlana Coghlan, 41, Isaac Feldman, 50, Fady Kaldas, 35, Stanislav Pavlenko, 39, Albert Takhalov, 29, and Siavash Zargari, 46.
Federal authorities built their case against the defendants by using a local undercover agent who posed as a corrupt police officer and infiltrated the organization, gaining the trust of the conspirators and the “B-girls.” Other undercover agents posed as victims.

The organization opened at least six South Beach clubs, obtained liquor and business licenses, and acquired merchant account and credit card terminals to be used in the clubs. The conspirators also are alleged to have organized the “B-girls” to come to the U.S., slipping them through the Visa Waiver Program by claiming that the women were not coming to work or to engage in criminal activity. Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania were admitted to the program in November 2008, meaning citizens of those countries no longer have to obtain a visa to visit America. The women are said to have been trained in Eastern Europe to work the fraud scheme.

In Miami, the women would work in pairs, hunting for the victims in other clubs, usually between the hours of 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. B-Girls’ ideal targets are wealthy males, preferably tourists or traveling businessmen due to the low probability that they will come back into the club once they have discovered the money charged to their account, say investigators.
Defendants named as “B-girls” are Viktorija Artemjeva, 21, Irina Domkova, 22, Anna Kilimatova, 25, Valeria Matsova, 22, Anastassia Mikrukova, 32, Agnese Rudaka, 22, Kristina Takhalov, 29, Marina Turcina, 24, Anastassia Usakova, 25, and Julija Vinogradova, 22.

The investigators believe that Artemjeva had worked for Simchuk in Estonia. Three other women were planning to work in a club Simchuk was opening in Prague. The “B-girls” would get about 20 percent of the victim’s bill, while the bartenders or managers would get 10 percent. The rest of the bill would go to the criminal organization.
A similar scheme is still used to defraud foreign tourists in Riga. The U.S. Embassy in Riga, on its homepage, still provides a list of nightclubs in Riga that it recommends avoiding.