United States v. Carlos Tejeda

── United States v. Carlos Tejeda ── Case No.: 23-12989 Court: Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit Date: March 31, 2026 Category: NEW USCA11 Case: 23-12989 Document: 142-1 Date Filed: 03/31/2026 Page: 1 of 14 NOT FOR PUBLICATION In the United States Court of Appeals For the Eleventh Circuit ____________________ No. 23-12989 ____________________ UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Plaintiff-Appellee, versus CARLOS TEJEDA, JUAN TEJEDA, PEDRO SERGIO PELAEZ GUTIERREZ, a.k.a. Pedro Pelaez, Defendants-Appellants. ____________________ Appeals from the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida USCA11 Case: 23-12989 Document: 142-1 Date Filed: 03/31/2026 Page: 2 of 14 2 Opinion of the Court 23-12989 D.C. Docket No. 2:22-cr-00036-SPC-NPM-1 ____________________ Before NEWSOM and LUCK, Circuit Judges and LEIBOWITZ, ∗ District Judge PER CURIAM: Pedro Sergio Pelaez Gutierrez (“Pelaez”), Carlos Tejeda (“Carlos”), and Juan Tejeda (“Juan”)1 were tried, convicted, and sen- tenced for conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, aggra- vated identity theft, and related offenses. Each defendant raises separate issues on appeal: Pelaez challenges the sufficiency of the evidence for his convictions; Carlos appeals his sentence as substan- tively unreasonable; and Juan appeals the application of a three-level enhancement to his offense level under U.S.S.G. § 3B1.1(b) for acting as a manager or supervisor in criminal activity involving five or more participants based on his role in the fraud scheme. We reject each argument, and, accordingly, AFFIRM each conviction and sentence. ∗ Honorable David S. Leibowitz, United States District Judge for the Southern District of Florida, sitting by designation. 1 Carlos and Juan have the same last name, so we refer to them by their first names. USCA11 Case: 23-12989 Document: 142-1 Date Filed: 03/31/2026 Page: 3 of 14 23-12989 Opinion of the Court 3 I A Carlos—the mastermind behind the operation—hatched a scheme whereby he and his friends (“the participants”) would (1) register fake businesses with the Florida Department of State Divi- sion of Corporations, (2) open bank accounts and buy credit card machines in the names of those businesses, (3) steal credit card in- formation and attach it to their own homemade cards, (4) swipe those fake cards at the credit card terminals, and (5) deposit the proceeds of those transactions into the bank accounts. Carlos would bring the counterfeit credit cards to the participants and swipe them on the credit card terminals, usually for a 40 percent kickback. Juan—the IT whiz and Carlos’s son—would construct the counterfeit cards and encode them with the stolen credit card in- formation. On occasion, he would visit the participants and swipe the counterfeit cards on the credit card machines, just like Carlos. Various participants testified that Carlos and Juan were the go-to guys handling the day-to-day fraud. When agents searched Juan’s apartment, they found plastic cards with a black magnetic stripe on the back, an encoder with which to write data onto magnetic stripes, and counterfeit c