Payments broker Jeremy Todd Briley gets 3 years in prison for helping run a fake marketing charges scheme

A payments processing broker tied to a criminal ring that used sham online marketing companies to take unauthorized payments from consumers and businesses was sentenced to three years in prison on Monday. For PSPs and acquirers, the detail that matters is simple: this was not just merchant fraud, but a broker who helped place and disguise the traffic.

1. Jeremy Todd Briley, 47, of Happy Valley, Oregon, pleaded guilty in April to one count of wire fraud. Along with the prison term, he received three years of supervised release after he gets out.
2. The Department of Justice said Briley must forfeit $460,000 that was part of his gains from the scheme. The criminal case follows proceedings that began after the DOJ and other federal agencies moved against what it called a processing fraud ring.
3. According to the DOJ, Briley and nine other individuals bilked victims in the U.S. of $14 million by creating fake marketing firms that supposedly offered services but in practice used those fronts to pull unauthorized debits from thousands of bank accounts.
4. The DOJ said Briley set up relationships with payment processors so he could handle the sham charges between February 2017 and December 2023. It also said he concealed the fraudulent activity even after repeatedly receiving information that the debits were not authorized by the victims.
5. One of the more useful bits for risk teams: the DOJ says Briley arranged for a payment processor to deceive banks by manipulating return rates on transactions. That is the kind of behavior that usually turns an ordinary merchant review into a broader exposure question for the processor, the broker, and anyone downstream in the flow.