Judge orders man to serve 29 months after he pleads guilty to online fraud

Enlarge / This real Mercedes-Benz GL450 was one of the cars that Vlad Diaconu tried to trick people into believing that he was selling. (credit: FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/Getty Images)

It’s like your parents always told you: if something’s too good to be true, it probably is.

Or, translated into the online world: if a guy in Romania claiming to be an American service member overseas wants to sell you a Mercedes at a really good price and all you have to do is send some money to an escrow account, he’s probably scamming you.

On Friday, a Romanian man was sentenced by a federal judge in Tennessee to two years and five months in prison for participating in a scheme to defraud Americans out of over $870,000 in goods that never existed.