The vehicles didn’t exist. The loans did. And when a Tampa car dealer needed to squeeze even more money out of his scheme, he tried shipping a stolen $460,000 Rolls-Royce out of the country in a cargo container.
Loans for Cars That Were Never Sold
Mohamad Jihad Fakih, 27, used his access to dealership systems and financing platforms to submit loan applications for vehicles that were never actually sold or delivered, according to federal prosecutors. The scheme relied on straw purchasers willing to attach their names to the paperwork; once financing companies approved the applications, the loan funds were wired directly to Fakih as the supposed seller, and he divided the proceeds among his co-conspirators. Investigators tied at least six phantom vehicles to the operation, with combined losses exceeding $372,000.
The Insurance Fraud Pivot
Fakih didn’t stop at collecting loan payouts. Prosecutors say he also filed false insurance claims on the same nonexistent vehicles, reporting them as stolen even though they had never been purchased or delivered in the first place — an attempt to extract a second round of payouts from insurers on top of the financing fraud already in motion. It’s a detail that shows the scheme wasn’t a one-time loan trick but a system built to be worked from multiple angles at once.
Smuggling a Stolen Rolls-Royce Through the Port of Savannah
Separately, prosecutors say Fakih used another straw purchaser to obtain a Rolls-Royce Cullinan valued at roughly $460,000 that was already tied to financing obligations, then attempted to move it out of the country by sealing it inside a shipping container bound for the Port of Savannah with falsified paperwork meant to hide the container’s true contents.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers intercepted the shipment before it left port, opened the container, and identified the Rolls-Royce as a stolen vehicle connected to the broader fraud investigation — stopping the export and handing investigators a direct link between the loan scheme and the attempted vehicle smuggling.
The Sentence
Following his conviction on August 21, 2025, for conspiracy to commit wire fraud and attempting to export a stolen motor vehicle, U.S. Senior District Judge Virginia M. Hernandez Covington sentenced Fakih to four and a half years in federal prison. The court also ordered forfeiture of $378,886.96, the amount investigators determined Fakih obtained through the fraudulent loan transactions. Combined with the recovered federal prison case’s paper trail — falsified shipping documents, loan applications, and financial transfers — the forfeiture order and interception at the port effectively closed the loop on a scheme that spanned financing fraud, insurance fraud, and attempted international smuggling.