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Umer Hassan Mir, 40, of South Amboy told a federal judge in Newark on Tuesday that he deposited the charges into the coffers of a Delta gas station in Metuchen, then siphoned off the proceeds in cash from the register over the course of 3½ years.
Some of the bogus charges were entered on fuel credit cards leased by the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) and assigned to Amtrak vehicles, U.S. Attorney Philip R. Sellinger said.
Mir used the money “for personal expenses and to pay another gas station employee for working extra hours on (his) behalf,” the U.S. attorney said.
“Mir would manually enter account information regarding fuel credit cards that he personally collected and saved during legitimate fuel transactions electronically into the point-of-sale terminal at the Delta gas station,” Sellinger said.
“Following false fuel transactions, Mir withdrew cash in the amount of the fraudulent transaction from the gas station’s cash register,” he added.
The scam ended last August. Arrested by federal agents, Mir took a deal from the government rather than face trial in the hopes of getting leniency.
U.S. District Judge Claire C. Cecchi scheduled sentencing for Dec. 13 for Mir’s guilty pleas to fraud-related offenses.
Sellinger credited special agents of the Amtrak Office of Inspector General for the Eastern Region, the GSA Office of Inspector General’s Northeast Field Investigations Division and postal inspectors with the U.S. Postal Inspection Service’s Philadelphia Division with the investigation leading to the guilty plea, secured by Senior Trial Counsel Leslie Faye Schwartz of his Special Prosecutions Division.
He also thanked Metuchen police for their assistance.
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