Latest update April 1st, 2025 5:37 PM
Guyanese convicted swindler dies before sentencing
Deowraj Buddhu
Connecticut, US (courant.com) – A former Wethersfield man who swindled hundreds of thousands of dollars from people drowning in debt was to be sentenced Friday (today) to prison.
Instead, Deowraj “Deo” Buddhu will be buried.
The convicted felon died in prison January 16 and his funeral is today. He had been incarcerated since his arrest in June 2012. He was 71. The cause of his death was not available on Wednesday.
Buddhu was convicted in U.S. District Court in Hartford in June 2013 of six counts of mail fraud and seven counts of passing phony financial instruments. He faced spending the rest of his life in prison. A jury took less than an hour to convict him after hearing nine days of testimony.
The government said Buddhu preyed on unsuspecting Hartford-area residents who were saddled with mortgage payments, credit card debt and car loans. He promised to erase their debt, and in some cases, get them more money, by enrolling them in what he called a secret government program – one that prosecutors said didn’t exist. He provided fake bonds that he said would cover their debt, according to testimony.
Like Buddhu, who was from Guyana, many of his victims were immigrants and were unfamiliar with American financial practices.
“This defendant’s fictitious debt elimination scheme defrauded numerous struggling homeowners, many of whom were immigrants with little command of the English language,” U.S. Attorney Deirdre M. Daly said at the time of the conviction.
In 2005, Buddhu was sentenced to four years in prison for selling fake U.S. birth certificates to illegal immigrants.
In 2009, as a result of a civil action by the U.S. Department of Justice, a federal judge permanently barred him and his daughter from operating a tax preparation business. The judge found that they had prepared thousands of false and fraudulent tax returns from 2004 to 2008, substantially understating their clients’ tax liabilities.
The crimes, for which he was found guilty in June, date back to 2009. Dozens of clients who already were experiencing financial problems plunged deeper into debt, and some homes ended up in foreclosure, according to testimony and court records.
His daughter, Sunita Buddhu, 43, of Wethersfield, was sentenced in October to 30 months in prison for helping her father with his fraudulent debt elimination scheme that victimized more than 125 people in Connecticut, New York, Wisconsin, Florida and Georgia.
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