The Department of Justice announced on Thursday that Mario Flores, an illegal immigrant from Honduras, was sentenced to eight years in prison for fraudulently cashing $89 million in a payroll scheme between 2015 and 2022, which involved employing other illegal immigrants working in the United States. Flores also filed false tax documents with the IRS to avoid detection of his illegal financial scheme. He was sentenced on Wednesday.

Court documents show that while in the country illegally, Flores created multiple shell companies to create and manage an “unlicensed check cashing and cash courier service business.” Over the course of seven years, Flores’s scam companies cashed checks from construction industry workers totaling around $89 million, while also charging these workers a percentage of the check’s value as a fee for doing so, according to the DOJ.