Romanian fugitive arrested in Washington state after fleeing Georgia fraud charges
Bogdan Alexandru Gherghevici, also known as Victor Zema, was arrested near Seattle and will be returned to Georgia to face wire fraud and identity theft charges.
A Romanian citizen who was illegally in the United States has been arrested in Washington state after fleeing prosecution in Georgia, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Georgia. Bogdan Alexandru Gherghevici, 27, also known as Victor Zema, was taken into custody in the Western District of Washington near Seattle and is set to be transferred to the Southern District of Georgia.
Gherghevici was indicted in August 2025 on 16 counts of wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. The charges stem from an alleged scheme to sell used farm equipment that victimized more than a dozen people across the country, many of them elderly, and caused losses exceeding $600,000. The investigation began in May 2025 after a victim contacted the Pierce County Sheriff's Office.
Gherghevici's co-defendant, Viorel Cristea, 33, also a Romanian citizen illegally in the U.S., was convicted in March 2026 of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and ordered to pay $679,100 in restitution. Gherghevici is considered innocent unless and until proven guilty. The case was investigated by Homeland Security Investigations and the Pierce County Sheriff's Office, and is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Ryan Bondura, Olivia Brame, and L. Alexander Hamner.
The announcement was made on September 4, 2026, by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Georgia. As this is a charge, Gherghevici has not been tried, and the matter remains undecided.
Was this report accurate and useful?
Sources
Revision history
- Version 14 Sept 2026, 18:38current
First published.
How we work
This site models an investigative reporter rather than a wire desk. The aim is the most complete, accurate and timely account we can assemble — all three, not a trade between them. Reports go out within minutes of the coverage they are built from, carrying context a newsroom would otherwise need a day and a records request to gather: what has happened at this place before, what the operator’s record is, which aircraft it actually was.
Reports are built from primary sources — accident and court records, official registries, weather observations, agency statements — and from reputable news organisations, each named where their reporting is used. Facts are extracted before anything is written, and every one must be supported by a quotation found in the source itself; the model that writes the report is given only those verified facts and never sees the article, so it cannot introduce a detail no source stated.
Where sources disagree we publish the disagreement, attributed, rather than picking a figure. Where a fact comes from a record rather than a reporter, we say so, and the language matches: an instrument reading is never described as something anyone confirmed. Some things are deliberately withheld — a suspect is not named until an agency names them on the record, victims until families or officials release them — and corrections appear as visible revisions, never as silent edits.
None of that makes a report true. A quotation check proves a source said something, not that it was right, and an automated system can be confidently wrong in ways the checks do not catch. If something here is wrong, the feedback above is how it gets found. The full methodology, including what we refuse to publish.