In Francisco Aguirre’s telling, he thought it was odd that a friend described buying a car from Tricolor Holdings that came without a license plate.
The self-styled paralegal began digging. He discovered not only that the subprime auto lender had gone bankrupt and faced accusations of years-long fraud, but that its customers were largely undocumented immigrants—thousands of whom were shut out of the legal process and needed help.
Aguirre, 65, took to TikTok under the alias El Jefe Legal, Spanish for The Legal Boss. Filming himself in an empty Tricolor parking lot last fall, he said he could help defrauded customers reduce or eliminate their loans. If people needed relief, he said, he was the man to call.
The US bankruptcy court docket soon swelled with more than 40 motions filed by his team at Beyond Attorneys LLC, all resembling templates generated by artificial intelligence, seeking the suspension of loan payments, issuance of titles, and information on the debt collector.
“He told us that he was going to completely eliminate the debt,” said Aliandris Núñez, a Cuban now residing in Kentucky, who hired him in January. “Tricolor payments weren’t going down, and he said he was going to stop that.”
The selfless hero was, in reality, a thrice-convicted fraudster with a history of victimizing Spanish-speaking populations and even his own family in mortgage schemes. He’s filed for bankruptcy three times. He isn’t licensed as a lawyer or paraprofessional, and had faced legal actions from the Arizona State Bar for the unauthorized practice of law. Even before inserting himself into the Tricolor case, he’d been acting in “blatant disregard” of the terms of his probation, including bans on acting as a lawyer, and now he was soliciting clients on TikTok, his probation officer said in a report filed in March.
By the time a bankruptcy court ordered him to appear for an April hearing onpotential sanctions for acting as a lawyer in the Tricolor case, he was a no-show. Arizona authorities had arrested him and sent him back to prison after a court found he’d violated his probation agreement.
But by then, Aguirre and his team lined up roughly $75,000 from Tricolor victims, not counting what he got from people who never had motions filed on their behalf, according to the Department of Justice’s bankruptcy monitor.
It’s not clear where most of the money went, though Aguirre’s restitution payments to some victims of his previous crimes temporarily increased just as he began taking payments from Tricolor victims.
This article was originally published by Bloomberg Law.
Photo: TikTok
Angélica Serrano Román 