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A Mountain View man on Wednesday admitted to federal mail fraud charges, confessing he faked military service for years to collect hundreds of thousands of dollars in benefits from his former employer, federal prosecutors said.
Omar Naziry, 40, pleaded guilty to one count of mail fraud. He admitted to orchestrating a years-long scheme in which he falsely claimed to be deployed with the U.S. military to collect military differential pay from a global aerospace and security firm identified in court documents only as “Company 1,” based on a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California.
Federal prosecutors said that the company maintained a post-9/11 policy of supplementing the pay of employees who took military leave, ensuring they suffered no loss of income due to deployment. The program aimed to support servicemembers among its workforce and had since been expanded to cover all forms of military duty.
Naziry admitted to submitting fake military orders and earnings statements beginning in August 2016 and falsely claimed in 2017 that his “deployment” had been extended four more years. The company paid him based on those false statements. A third fraudulent request in 2021 was denied after he reached the program’s five-year cap.
In 2022, Naziry attempted to secure more money using a fake identity and, after the company raised concerns over the authenticity of his military documents, he responded by mailing a letter falsely claiming he was stationed in the Middle East and that his orders were legitimate.
Prosecutors say the scheme caused the company financial losses estimated between $250,000 and $550,000.
Naziry also admitted to a separate scheme in which he fraudulently obtained more than $35,000 in federal housing aid between January 2021 and October 2022 by underreporting his income to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Naziry, who is out on bond, is scheduled to be sentenced on Sept. 24. According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, he faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine, or twice the amount he unlawfully gained.
