He bought a $114,175 Corvette with someone else’s name and got 42 months

On October 4, 2022, Lei Zhou used a stolen identity to obtain $114,175.31 in financing for a 2021 Chevrolet Corvette at a Greenwich, Connecticut, car dealership. A federal judge has now sentenced the 43-year-old from Flushing, New York, to 42 months in prison. The Corvette was one of at least six luxury vehicles, worth more than $650,000 in total, that Zhou and his associates obtained from the same dealership.

The sentence follows a guilty plea in May to conspiracy to commit bank and wire fraud and to aggravated identity theft. The method, as prosecutors describe it, needed no technical skill: borrow another person’s credit, back it with forged paperwork and drive the car to a buyer in another state before the lender notices.

The Corvette financing and the forged check

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Connecticut, Zhou and others used stolen personal information and counterfeit identity documents belonging to multiple victims to obtain financing for the vehicles. For the Corvette, he applied in one victim’s name and was approved for $114,175.31. The down payment was a forged $14,000 check drawn in the name of a different victim.

The financing figure is the amount lent against the car, not a sticker price. The loan sat in the name of a person who had not applied for it, which is the heart of the aggravated identity theft count.

Carscoops lays out the same sequence for automotive readers and adds that Zhou, if he serves the full term, is expected to be released in early 2028. Its headline calls him convicted, and the underlying record is a guilty plea entered on May 22, 2026, rather than a trial verdict.

Sentencing in Hartford

U.S. District Judge Sarala V. Nagala sentenced Zhou in Hartford on Wednesday, September 24, according to the Greenwich Free Press. The term of 42 months equals three and a half years. U.S. Attorney David X. Sullivan announced the outcome, and Assistant U.S. Attorney Elena L. Coronado prosecuted the case, which the FBI investigated with help from the Greenwich Police Department and the New York City Police Department.

Zhou was arrested in August 2024 and entered his plea on May 22, 2026, to one count of conspiracy to commit bank and wire fraud and one count of aggravated identity theft. The two counts reflect the two halves of the scheme: the agreement among several people to defraud lenders, and the specific use of other people’s identifying information to do it.

The other cars and a companion case

The vehicles were driven or shipped to New York for resale, Patch reported from the prosecutors’ account, but most were repossessed before they could be sold. Carscoops adds that one Corvette was being moved to New York for resale in the course of the scheme.

The same dealership appears in a companion prosecution. In a separate Justice Department release, a second man, Huachun Zheng, received 30 months after he used a stolen identity on September 27, 2022, to obtain $94,742.73 in financing for a 2019 Porsche Panamera. Prosecutors said the group also passed fraudulent checks to buy jewelry, and Zheng was arrested while driving a Maserati bought through a similar scheme. He pleaded guilty on January 6, 2026, to the same two kinds of charges Zhou faced.

The timeline shows how slowly such a case moves. The Corvette transaction dates to October 4, 2022, and the Panamera to September 27, 2022. Zhou was arrested in August 2024, and Zheng was detained from January 28, 2025. Zheng pleaded guilty on January 6, 2026, Zhou followed on May 22, and the sentences came in the fall of 2026, nearly four years after the first of the transactions the prosecutors describe. The Corvette’s $114,175.31 in financing is one of two loan amounts the prosecutors have itemized publicly, alongside the Panamera’s $94,742.73, out of a scheme they put at no less than $650,000.

The prosecutors’ totals stop at six vehicles and $650,000, described as a minimum. The releases do not say how many victims’ identities were used beyond the ones tied to the Corvette and the Panamera, and that victim count is the figure the public record has not supplied. Nor do the summaries of the releases state how much the dealership or its lenders ultimately lost after the repossessions, a gap that leaves the $650,000 as a measure of what was financed rather than what was recovered or written off. The only dated end point in the coverage is the Carscoops estimate that Zhou would be released in early 2028 if he serves all 42 months, a projection that depends on Bureau of Prisons calculations the reports do not detail.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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