(USNewsBreak.com) – Impersonating a federal officer is a crime punishable by a fine or jail time. Yet, the threat of arrest and prosecution doesn’t stop some people from taking the risk. One California man is now facing jail time and significant fines for crossing the line.
On Thursday, July 11, the US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of California announced that a federal jury found 38-year-old Anton Andreyevich Iagounov guilty of four counts of impersonating a federal officer. On four separate occasions in 2022, he created fake search warrants pretending to be a Special Agent of NASA’s Office of Inspector General (NASA-OIG). The warrants also “appear[ed] to be authorized by a US District Court judge for the District of Columbia.”
Capitol Police investigated the first incident on July 5, 2022, and determined the document was fake. The police referred it to NASA-OIG to probe deeper. The second incident occurred just days later, on July 11, 2022. Iagounov pretended once again to be the same agent and sent another fake search warrant to the US District Court for the Central District of California. This one lacked a judge’s signature, and he emailed it from a spoofed email address while doctoring it to look like an official government email. He then sent other similar documents to the US Bankruptcy Court for the Middle District of Georgia and the US District Court for the Northern District of Florida on July 18 and July 24, respectively. He also allegedly called in bomb threats to several locations and then followed up to see if they had taken any action.
The receiving officers at each of the courts referred the matter to NASA-OIG, as did the Capitol Police. The space agency’s law enforcement body worked jointly with the FBI, Carson City Sheriff’s Office, and the South Lake Tahoe Police Department during the investigation.
The court has scheduled Iagounov for sentencing on October 17. He is facing up to a $1 million fine and a maximum prison sentence of 12 years.
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