Alleged gold bar courier arrested in Portland scheme targeted others in Idaho and on East Coast, feds say - oregonlive.com

These are the five one-kilogram gold bars and three smaller 100-gram gold bars that an 86-year-old Portland woman had bought and prepared to hand over to a courier who showed up at her house, before the FBI interceded and made an arrest, according to a federal prosecutor.U.S. Attorney's Office

Biao Lin, charged in federal court with picking up more than $3 million in gold bars from an unsuspecting elderly couple in Portland, is now suspected of grabbing more than $8 million in gold bars from at least two other people on the East Coast and in Idaho, a prosecutor said this week.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Scott Kerin revealed the new allegations as he urged a federal judge to order Lin held in custody pending trial.

Defense lawyer Shanon L. Gray downplayed Lin’s role, calling him only a “courier.” Gray asked the judge to release Lin to a halfway house in Portland and then allow him to return to Brooklyn, where he could be supervised by federal pretrial officers.

“There’s no evidence he personally defrauded anyone,” Gray said.

Lin, a 27-year-old Chinese citizen, was arrested last month in Portland, accused of traveling across the country in a criminal conspiracy to pick up gold bars from an unsuspecting local couple, an 86-year-old woman and her husband, 93.

He was arrested by the FBI as he was about to pick up more than $400,00 in gold bars from them, according to court records.

The couple attended the detention hearing for Lin before U.S. Magistrate Judge Jeffrey Armistead in federal court in Portland on Wednesday. Lin listened to the proceedings with the help of a Mandarin interpreter.

FBI investigations have uncovered similar cases across the nation targeting elderly people that led to the arrests of two other people in Oregon earlier this year.

Investigators say hackers break into people’s computers and then claim that they’re government officials trying to help scam victims protect their assets. They convince people to convert money into gold for safekeeping by the U.S. Treasury and then send couriers to pick up the gold bars.

While Lin’s alleged role was as a courier in the conspiracy scheme, picking up and depositing gold bars from targeted victims, he’s “still a linchpin in the organization to go get the money and the gold,” Kerin said at Lin’s custody hearing.

Armistead took the matter under advisement and ordered Lin to remain in custody until he makes a decision.

“As kids say, his conduct is ‘sus,’’' said Armistead, using slang for suspicious.

He noted that Lin is accused of “direct interaction with alleged victims.”

Since Lin’s arrest in the Portland case, he’s also been identified as a suspect in four pickups of gold bars from a person in the New York-New Jersey metropolitan area, Kerin said.

A man matching Lin’s description in a car registered to Lin made the pickups from the East Coast victim for a total loss of about $585,000, he said.

Based on a preliminary analysis of one of Lin’s cellphones, investigators now also suspect that Lin flew from Atlanta to Spokane on Oct. 3, rented a car and picked up gold bars from a person in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, before returning to the Spokane airport to make a FedEx shipment and then driving south to Portland, Kerin said.

Investigators found a suspected victim’s address in Coeur d’Alene and a “password” to use on that pickup on Lin’s phone and evidence of the subsequent FedEx shipment, Kerin said.

Investigators planned to reach out to the Idaho person this week and are working to identify the organizers of the alleged scheme, Kerin said.

He argued against Lin’s release, saying Lin entered the United States unlawfully in 2019, didn’t apply for asylum until 2020 and could easily flee back to his homeland to avoid prosecution because the United States has no extradition treaty with China.

Gray, Lin’s lawyer, said his client would surrender his Chinese passport to pretrial supervision officers.

Kerin replied that Lin could get a new passport by slipping across the U.S. border into Canada or Mexico and then claiming his passport was stolen. The judge called that conjecture.

Gray said Lin has been working as a chef at a sushi restaurant and lives with a relative in Brooklyn.

Lin is being held at the federal detention center in Sheridan and can’t communicate with anyone there because he doesn’t speak English, Gray said.

If Armistead were to grant pretrial release for Lin, the government asked that his order be put on hold for review by a federal district judge. As of Friday, Armistead had not issued a new ruling.

-- Maxine Bernstein covers federal court and criminal justice. Reach her at 503-221-8212, [email protected], follow her on X @maxoregonian, or on LinkedIn.

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