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The five employees from a Fort Worth-based company who were indicted Feb. 11 in a $220 million cattle sale fraud are accused of falsifying records to cover their scheme and paying themselves seven-figure salaries, according to court documents.
McClatchy
Five employees from a Fort Worth-based company who were indicted Feb. 11 in a cattle sale fraud are accused of paying themselves extravagant salaries with victims’ money and falsifying records to cover their tracks, according to court documents.
Agridime LLC began operating in 2017. From January 2021 through December 2023, authorities say the defendants — operations director Jed Wood, executive director Joshua Link, marketing director Tia Link, financial controller Royana Thomas and cattle broker Tyler Bang — collected more than $220 million by promising investors their funds would be used to buy and raise cattle and sell the meat for a profit. The employees used the company’s website and bank accounts in the scheme, according to the federal indictment.
Instead of fulfilling their contracts, the suspects used the funds for the company’s operating costs and their own personal expenses, the documents state. More than 2,200 victims, including cattle purchasers, ranchers and feedlots, have been identified nationwide.
How the alleged scheme worked
The Agridime website from that time advertised a 15% to 20% return on the contracts, according to screenshots contained in court documents. The purchaser could buy a steer or heifer at $2,000 a head. Each one would yield approximately 500 pounds of beef and could be sold for $6 per pound. The customer would receive between $300 to $400 profit for each animal, and Agridime would receive $600, the website stated.
“We feel if we were giving much less than a 15-20% return that we wouldn’t be doing right by our customers,” the website stated. “Our aim is to create a sustainable supply chain that we can have 100% transparency with start to finish and everybody still wins.”
The funds paid by the purchasers were put in an Agridime account, at least three of which were controlled by Joshua Link, Wood and Thomas, according to the indictment.
The defendants developed a variety of ways to cover their fraudulent activities, federal investigators said. In April 2023, Joshua Link is accused of issuing duplicate Electronic Identification tag information to two different purchasers to make them think that separate heads of cattle had been bought for each of them, the indictment states.
Also in April 2023, the Arizona Corporation Commission filed a cease and desist order against the company. The following month the North Dakota Securities Department followed suit. They alleged that Agridime was offering and selling unregistered securities, offering and selling securities while not registered as dealers or salesmen, and committing fraud on its website.
Joshua Link, Bang and Thomas sold some cattle to an Arizona resident in November 2023. To hide their “intentional violation” of the cease and desist order, the defendants named Bang as the buyer and left the real purchaser’s name off the contract, the indictment states. Then they allegedly had the buyer send $240,000 to an account owned by Bang instead of Agridime and generated fraudulent business records to hide the purchase.
The same month, Thomas allegedly encouraged a potential buyer to purchase 125 head of cattle and promised him profits of more than 24% a head. She said they were getting a really good price for selling the meat. According to the indictment, this was during a time when the funds coming in were used to pay money owed by Agridime to earlier cattle buyers, not purchase new cattle.
In spite of the cease and desist orders and scrutiny the company was under, Thomas told a potential buyer in July 2023 that “we have passed our 2023 audit with the USDA and are above reproach with all standards and regulations … This will not affect your current nor future contracts.” Tia Link told another customer something similar the following month, the indictment states.
In December 2023, Bang and Thomas planned to alter dates of sale on cattle purchase records and receipts to make it look like Agridime had paid for the cattle within 24 hours of each purchase “because delayed cattle payments may have resulted in a negative assessment of Agridime during a review of its business practices by the USDA,” the indictment states.
In another part of the scheme involving retained ownership contracts, Agridime agreed to care for the cattle of certain ranchers for a specified amount of time, investigators said. The company would then deliver the cattle to feedlots for processing into meat and Agridime would pay the ranchers a previously agreed on price.
“The defendants did not pay the ranchers, as promised,” the indictment states.
The defendants also profited financially from the scheme, authorities say. At one point, Wood and his wife received a salary and commission totaling nearly $2.5 million. Joshua Link and Tia Link received close to $3 million and Taylor $410,000. Bang received a commission of close to $7 million, according to the indictment.
If convicted, the suspects will have to forfeit to the government any property purchased with proceeds from the fraudulent cattle deals. They also could face up to 20 years in federal prison for each count of wire fraud and wire fraud conspiracy and 10 years for each count of money laundering.
In addition to Fort Worth, Agridime also had operations in Arizona, Kansas, North Dakota and other states. On Dec. 11, 2023, the court appointed a third party “receiver” to oversee the company’s affairs and preserve their assets. There is an ongoing U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission case against the company.
How one defendant responded
Joshua Link was indicted with the other suspects but has not been taken into custody. He’s currently on the FBI’s Most Wanted List. He is challenging the government’s allegations in public Facebook posts, maintaining that Agridime was a legitimate company. According to Link, the problems didn’t begin until after the government takeover in December 2023.
“The question remains, how many actual cattle were purchased by Agridime and how much meat in pounds was actually in inventory at the time of the government takeover?” Joshua Link wrote in a post Wednesday. “The biased ‘forensic’ accounting of the receivership paints a one sided and demonic picture of these numbers. However, even just a glance beyond the surface shows the truth and fact that Agridime purchased more than enough cattle to satisfy all contracts.”
In a Feb. 13 post, Joshua Link stated that “every person within Agridime acted in complete good faith.” The decisions made by himself and his wife, Tia Link, were based solely on accounting information they received from the Fort Worth office, he wrote.
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Harriet Ramos
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