Orange County man goes to jail for $3 million COVID fraud, loses yacht and $58,000 in cash

A Lake Forest man convicted of defrauding companies that paid more than $3 million for gloves during the Covid pandemic has been sentenced to seven years in prison and ordered to confiscate a yacht and nearly $60,000 in cash.

Christopher John Badsey, 63, told three companies he had access to millions of boxes of nitrile gloves in June and July 2020, at a time when this critical protective equipment was in short supply and even law enforcement and hospitals were struggling to get access. The national stockpile of nitrile gloves dropped from 16.9 million in December 2019 to just 2 million in October 2020, according to a U.S. Government Accountability Office report to Congress in November of that year.

When Badsey agreed to the sales contracts, he told the companies that the gloves would be kept in a Los Angeles warehouse and that they would have to post deposits of more than $1 million. Badsey told them to wire the money to accounts controlled by himself, his Irvine-based company, First Defense International Security Services Corp., or a co-conspirator, prosecutors said.

In total, the companies paid $3,231,990 for the gloves. But the gloves that Badsey allegedly wanted to sell did not exist.

“In fact, Badsey did not store gloves in any warehouse,” the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Central District of California said in a statement released Friday.

In a sentencing memo, federal prosecutors wrote that he “used the deposit money to make expensive purchases while bailing out potential buyers with false stories, including absurd claims that government officials had blocked his access to his warehouse with gloves.”

In April 2023, he pleaded guilty to four federal charges of wire fraud.

In addition to his prison sentence and the restitution award, prosecutors said Badsey also lost all title and interest in property he purchased with the money from the glove scam: a yacht, a pontoon boat, $58,923 in cash, two Mercedes-Benz vehicles, a motor home, two Ford pickup trucks, three all-terrain vehicles, a tractor and some fishing equipment.