3 O.C. Men Indicted in Airline Ticket Scheme

Three Orange County residents were among six people indicted Wednesday on charges of wire fraud after allegedly defrauding foreign and domestic airlines of nearly $800,000 through bogus ticket sales, authorities in Los Angeles said Wednesday.

Assistant U.S. Atty. David F. Taylor said the six men are accused of paying the owner of Atlas International Travel in Garden Grove $60,000 for more than 8,000 blank airline boarding passes and access to the agency’s printing computer and other equipment.

The men used the equipment to issue 95 validated airline tickets worth about $300,000, which they then sold to passengers without paying the airlines in November and December of 1992, Taylor said. Among the airlines defrauded are Delta, TWA, American, United, America West, Cathay Pacific and KLM.

Federal agents seized the equipment and remaining blank passes before more tickets could be issued, Taylor said. The owner of Atlas International Travel has not been charged and is not named in the indictment, Taylor said.

He would not comment on how the FBI and the U.S. Postal Service found out about the scheme.

One of the men, Haroon Amin, 32, of Upland, is also charged in a second indictment with carrying out a similar scheme six years ago at Travel Quick Inc., an Anaheim travel agency that folded after the fraud.

Taylor said Amin gained access to the agency’s computer system and used it to issue tickets with a total face value of $189,000, which he allegedly sold without reimbursing the airlines. He used other agency documents to order tickets worth another $300,000, Taylor said.

Those indicted from Orange County were Afif Sami Masri, 46, of Lake Forest; Ghassan Kmeid, 36, of Orange, and his brother, Charles Kmeid, 38, of Placentia. Masri owns TFS Travel in Orange. He and Charles Kmeid were arrested Tuesday. Ghassan Kmeid remains at large.

Also indicted were Shahzada Mohd Farooq, 52, of Upland and Suchpreet Singh Dhillon, 38, of Sylmar. Farooq also remains at large.

The six men face 79 counts of wire fraud. Amin faces an additional nine counts. The maximum penalty for each count is five years in prison, a $250,000 fine and three years of supervised release, Taylor said.