Orlando trucking owner pleads guilty in $1M USPS freight fraud

The owner of an Orlando-based trucking and freight brokerage company has pleaded guilty to wire fraud and money laundering in a scheme that collected more than $1 million from the United States Postal Service for mail-hauling work that was never performed, federal prosecutors announced Friday.

Khayyam Arif Oglu Farajov, 40, owned and operated Talishco LLC in Orlando, Florida. In May 2022, Farajov enrolled the company in the USPS Freight Auction program, which the Postal Service launched in October 2021 to buy trucking capacity through competitive spot-market bidding. Between June 2022 and January 2023, Farajov bid on and was awarded hundreds of contracts to transport bulk mail across the country.

After winning the contracts, Farajov routinely and intentionally failed to send trucks to do the work, according to the plea agreement. When USPS staff asked where the trucks were, he offered false excuses — claiming he had lost contact with his drivers or that they were running behind schedule — which forced the Postal Service to reassign the work to other carriers. Farajov then went back into the Freight Auction platform, falsely marked the loads as delivered, and triggered payments for transportation his company never performed.

The scheme netted more than $1 million. Farajov funneled the money through a series of bank accounts belonging to shell companies he owned, reconsolidated the proceeds into two personal investment brokerage accounts, and invested the funds in the stock market for his personal enrichment. Federal investigators traced the money and seized the contents of both brokerage accounts.

As part of the plea, Farajov agreed to forfeit the seized brokerage accounts and pay an additional $993,979 in restitution to the USPS. Each count carries a maximum federal prison sentence of 20 years. The court has not yet scheduled sentencing. The case was investigated by the U.S. Postal Service Office of Inspector General and announced by U.S. Attorney Gregory W. Kehoe of the Middle District of Florida.

The case also exposed weaknesses in how USPS verified deliveries. A 2024 federal audit found 69,225 paid Freight Auction trips totaling approximately $197.9 million without reliable proof-of-delivery support. USPS disputed the finding, saying it later located records supporting about $195 million of the payments, but auditors maintained the agency had not properly verified the records before paying. Since then, USPS has tightened its verification procedures, eliminating manual confirmation codes and no longer accepting certain electronic messages as independent proof of delivery.

For carriers and owner-operators, the case is a reminder that digital freight platforms live or die on verification. Legitimate operators should keep meticulous pickup and delivery documentation — signed bills of lading, timestamped photos, GPS pings — because when fraud like this surfaces, honest carriers can get caught in the audit dragnet. And any broker or shipper asking you to mark loads delivered before the wheels stop should be treated as a red flag, not a favor.

The Freight Auction program continues to move billions of dollars of mail by truck. Cases like this one show why shippers are hardening their proof-of-delivery requirements — and why your paperwork is your best protection.