Ruby Corado Pleads Guilty to Wire Fraud
arrested and charged in March with fraud and money laundering for diverting $150,000 — which was taken from a larger pool of $1.3 million that Casa Ruby had obtained through the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) programs — into bank accounts held in El Salvador under her birth name, according to a U.S. Department of Justice news release.Prosecutors claimed Corado passed the money through her consulting company, TIGlobal, in an attempt to circumvent the Small Business Administration’s earlier denial of her EIDL application.Corado was temporarily jailed and placed in solitary confinement for her own protection, until a federal judge decided to release Corado and placed her under house arrest, with GPS monitoring, at the home of a niece in Rockville, Maryland.On Wednesday, July 17, Corado entered a plea deal in which she agreed to plead guilty to one count of wire fraud and give up all proceeds traceable to her offense, in exchange for the government dropping a much larger six-count complaint in which she was charged with bank fraud, money laundering, monetary transactions in criminally derived proceeds, and failure to file a report of a foreign bank account.The wire fraud offense is punishable by up to 30 years in prison.But under federal sentencing guidelines, due to it being Corado’s first offense and the crime not involving violence, Corado could receive a much lighter sentence.Prosecutors have argued that the sentence would fall between 33 to 41 months in prison, while her defense team estimates that she could serve between 15 and 21 months, reports The Washington Post.Corado is next scheduled to appear in court on January 10, 2025, for sentencing.