Jordan Wilcox
Assistant Publisher
Gregory Hite and Bridget Bureau are the newest owners of the Buckhorn Saloon in Lake– but before they purchased the bar, they ran businesses in Dorr, Byron Center, Coopersville, and all around the Grand Rapids area. Now they could face decades in prison for an alleged $2.5 million fraud scheme.
Their businesses involved recreational vehicle and trailer sales, manufacturing, and repair; and operated under a range of different names including Great Lakes Recreational, Alpine Trailer Sales, Great Lakes of West Michigan, Great Lakes Trailer Manufacturing, GLR Transport, and Great Lakes Recreational Brokerage, according to the indictment.
In a federal indictment released this week, investigators said the couple used stolen identities to obtain millions of dollars in business loans from 2016 to June 2020.
Investigators say the pair had an RV business in Littleton, Colorado which went bankrupt and wrecked their credit so bad that they couldn’t get any loans. That’s why when they moved to West Michigan, they began stealing their family members’ and employees’ social security numbers and driver’s licenses, using their good credit to get loans. The victims had no idea.
“In the documents, defendants falsely representing those individuals as co-owners or guarantors for the loans when they had not consented to be,” the indictment reads. “Defendants electronically submitted the fraudulent loan documents using the Internet from Michigan to the Lenders who were located in other states.”
The feds say that over four years from 2016 to 2020, the pair secured at least 55 fraudulent loans and credit advances, which added up to a $2.5 million loss.
Mark Totten, the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Michigan prosecuting the case, told WOOD-TV News 8 in Grand Rapids, that the alleged criminal activity “hurts a lot of people. It hurts the lenders who gave money believing they would be rightly paid back, it hurts those people whose identities were stolen. It could have long-term effects on them. It perhaps hurts consumers as well who thought they were dealing with a good-faith honest business.”
The indictment alleges that the location in Coopersville was shut down, because “their collateral was repossessed by a Lender.” Investigators say the Dorr location also later closed for similar reasons. So, Hite and Bureau moved to the Byron Center location in September 2019 and started manufacturing trailers instead. Investigators said they kept moving to different locations to avoid detection by the lenders.
“The scheme that we have described in our indictment demonstrates a willingness at every turn to try to hide this behavior: being willing to move the location of the business, being willing to change the name of the business, impersonating the voices of the people who had their identities stolen,” Totten said.
Investigators said the victims eventually caught on to the act after the lenders filed civil suits against them.
Hite and Bureau are both now facing multiple federal charges, including conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to commit mail fraud. The most serious charge carries up to 20 years in prison.
Totten said his office is committed to holding people who commit fraud accountable.
“This case touches a lot of criminal patterns that we are seeing that especially are hurting some of the more vulnerable populations in West Michigan,” Totten said. “We often see elderly citizens who are victims of scams, who perhaps are victims of identity theft. We want to make sure we are providing an effective deterrent, that there’s a message that’s getting out there to criminals that if you engage in this type of behavior, the federal government is going to come after you.”
If convicted, the pair will be required to forfeit at least $5 million.