In June 2018, plaintiff Luis Orlando Pérez-Greaux had his Arecibo, Puerto Rico home raided by the Puerto Rico Police Department (PRPD) after a period of surveillance. Pérez-Greaux was cooperative throughout the search, during which the PRPD found three kilograms (roughly 6.5 pounds) of cocaine, a digital scale, firearm periodicals, a gun holster, firearm magazines, separately packed bullets, and a .9mm Glock pistol that had been modified to function as a fully automatic machinegun. When questioned, Pérez-Greaux claimed that he had started drug trafficking earlier that year by packing cocaine with toys or various miscellaneous items and shipping it to the continental United States via the United States Postal Service. Although he provided two different accounts as to who gave him the firearm and how, in both he obtained the firearm from another individual who did not inform him that the firearm operated as a machinegun.

In 2019, Theory Wellness, an operator of marijuana dispensaries, contracted with Sean O’Donovan, a local Massachusetts attorney, to provide government-relations assistance in support of their endeavor to receive approval from the city of Medford, MA, to sell marijuana. O’Donovan attempted to influence  Medford’s chief of police through his brother to procure the approval by promising him some of the business's future proceeds but was eventually caught. He was found guilty of two counts of honest-services wire fraud and one count of federal program bribery. 

Oklean Jacob Ponle orchestrated a massive phishing scheme in 2019, leading to $8.03 million in actual losses and $51.3 million in intended losses to his victims. The scheme consisted of gaining unauthorized access to emails of company executives and using these emails to contact other employees with urgent demands to wire money, ostensibly for corporate needs, which ended up in the defendant’s pockets. Some of the wires were caught and reversed by banks; this is the source of the intended loss amount. After an FBI investigation and arrest, Ponle pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud in federal court. In determining the range for his sentence, the district court consulted federal sentencing guidelines, which provide a different number of points added to a defendant’s base level depending on the monetary amount of loss.

Federal law, as codified in 28 U.S.C. § 1495 and § 2513, provides the wrongfully convicted and imprisoned a mechanism to seek compensation from the United States government. 28 U.S.C. § 1495; United States v. Bala, 948 F.3d 948, 949 (8th Cir. 2020). Section 1495 grants jurisdiction for such cases to the Court of Federal Claims, but to be eligible, a person must first obtain a “certificate of innocence” from the court that reverses or sets aside the conviction. 28 U.S.C. § 2513 (a)(1). The decision to grant or deny a certificate is left to the discretion of the district court. United States v. Graham, 608 F.3d 164, 169 (4th Cir. 2010); Betts v. United States, 10 F.3d 1278, 1283 (7th Cir. 1993).