Wire Fraud Attorney

By Elizabeth Franklin-Best, Esq., and Christopher Zoukis, JD, MBA

The statute, and what each word does

Section 1343 reads, in its operative part:

“Whoever, having devised or intending to devise any scheme or artifice to defraud, or for obtaining money or property by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises, transmits or causes to be transmitted by means of wire, radio, or television communication in interstate or foreign commerce, any writings, signs, signals, pictures, or sounds for the purpose of executing such scheme or artifice, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.”

Four features of that sentence do most of the work.

“Scheme or artifice to defraud, or for obtaining money or property.” The statute is phrased in the disjunctive, which would suggest two independent theories: any scheme to defraud, and separately, a scheme to obtain money or property. The Supreme Court has consistently refused to read it that way. Because “the ‘common understanding’ of the words ‘to defraud’ when the statute was enacted referred ‘to wronging one in his property rights,'” the money-or-property requirement of the second phrase limits the first. That single interpretive move is the origin of McNally, Cleveland, Kelly and Ciminelli.

“Having devised or intending to devise.” The offense is complete on the scheme plus a qualifying wire. Success is not required. A scheme that failed entirely is still wire fraud if a wire was used to execute it.

“Transmits or causes to be transmitted.” The defendant need not personally send anything. Causing a transmission — including by setting in motion events in which a wire transmission is reasonably foreseeable — suffices.

“For the purpose of executing such scheme.” The wire must be in furtherance of the scheme. This is a real limit, though a narrow one, and it is discussed below.

Penalty structure

Circumstance	Maximum imprisonment	Maximum fine
Wire or mail fraud, standard	20 years	Fine under Title 18
Offense affects a financial institution	30 years	$1,000,000
Offense relates to a presidentially declared major disaster or emergency (as defined in 42 U.S.C. § 5122)	30 years	$1,000,000
Conspiracy or attempt under § 1349	Same as the object offense	Same as the object offense

Table: § 1343 and § 1341 penalty tiers. The financial-institution and disaster enhancements also extend the limitations period — see below.

The disaster-and-emergency clause is not a historical curiosity. It was the basis on which pandemic-relief fraud prosecutions carried thirty-year rather than twenty-year maximums, and it remains available for any federally declared disaster.

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Element one: a scheme to defraud

The scheme is the heart of the offense and the place where the recent case law bites.

The property requirement

The object of the scheme must be money or property, and it must be property in the hands of the victim. That last qualification comes from Cleveland v. United States, 531 U.S. 12, 15 (2000): “It does not suffice that the object of the fraud may become property in the recipient’s hands; for purposes of the mail fraud statute, the thing obtained must be property in the hands of the victim.” Cleveland held that state video-poker licenses are not property in the hands of the licensor, because a government’s “intangible rights of allocation, exclusion, and control amount to no more and no less than [the State’s] sovereign power to regulate.”

What is property has also been decided. In Carpenter v. United States, 484 U.S. 19, 25–26 (1987), the Court held that confidential business information is property: “Confidential information acquired or compiled by a corporation in the course and conduct of its business is a species of property to which the corporation has the exclusive right and benefit.” Carpenter also establishes that a scheme to defraud does not require monetary loss — “it is sufficient that the Journal has been deprived of its right to exclusive use of the information.” That proposition, from 1987, turned out to anticipate Kousisis.

Kelly: the property must be the object, not a side-effect

Kelly v. United States arose from the deliberate realignment of access lanes at the George Washington Bridge for political retribution. The government proved deception comprehensively. The convictions still fell, because the government could not show that money or property was the object of the scheme.

Two holdings from Kelly recur in defense motions:

1. Regulatory power is not property. The scheme “implicate[d] the Government’s role as sovereign wielding traditional police powers — not its role as property holder.”
2. Incidental costs are not the object. The government argued that the employee time consumed by a sham traffic study was property taken. The Court agreed that a government’s right to its employees’ labor is a property interest — but held that “property must play more than some bit part in a scheme: It must be an object of the fraud.” The labor costs “were an incidental (even if foreseen) byproduct” of the regulatory object. “Neither defendant sought to obtain the services that the employees provided.”

The second holding is far more portable than the facts suggest. Any prosecution in which the alleged property deprivation is an administrative or transaction cost of the scheme rather than its aim — audit expense, compliance cost, staff time spent investigating — is vulnerable to it.

Ciminelli: the right-to-control theory is gone

For roughly three decades the Second Circuit sustained convictions on a theory that “the property interests protected by the wire fraud statute include the interest of a victim in controlling his or her own assets,” so that harm occurred whenever a scheme deprived a victim of “information necessary to make discretionary economic decisions.” That theory made almost any material non-disclosure in a commercial transaction a federal felony.

Ciminelli rejected it in full: “Because ‘potentially valuable economic information’ ‘necessary to make discretionary economic decisions’ is not a traditional property interest, we now hold that the right-to-control theory is not a valid basis for liability under § 1343.” The Court grounded the holding in the text — the fraud statutes are “limited in scope to the protection of property rights” — and in the structure of § 1346, reasoning that when Congress responded to McNally it revived “only the intangible right of honest services,” and that “Congress’ reverberating silence about other [such] intangible interests forecloses the expansion of the wire fraud statute to cover the intangible right to control.”

Ciminelli also delivered a procedural holding of independent value. The government asked the Court to affirm on an alternative theory — that the defendant had in fact obtained valuable contracts, a traditional form of property. The Court refused, because that theory had never been put to the jury: “Appellate courts are not permitted to affirm convictions on any theory they please simply because the facts necessary to support the theory were presented to the jury.” Where a jury was instructed on an invalid theory, the conviction cannot be rescued by a valid one the jury never considered.

For anyone convicted before May 2023 on right-to-control jury instructions, whether relief is available now depends on procedural posture — direct appeal, or a collateral challenge. That is a § 2255 motion question, and it is time-sensitive.

Honest services: § 1346, Skilling, and Percoco

Section 1346 is one sentence: “For the purposes of this chapter, the term ‘scheme or artifice to defraud’ includes a scheme or artifice to deprive another of the intangible right of honest services.”

It exists because of McNally v. United States, 483 U.S. 350 (1987), which held that the fraud statutes protect property rights only and do not authorize federal prosecutors to “set[] standards of disclosure and good government for local and state officials.” Congress enacted § 1346 the following year to restore the honest-services theory.

The trouble was that the restored theory had no defined content. In Skilling v. United States, the Court confronted a vagueness challenge and resolved it by construction rather than invalidation, paring the pre-McNally case law “down to its core” and holding that “§ 1346 covers only bribery and kickback schemes.”

Three consequences follow, and they are the points most often stated wrongly:

• Undisclosed self-dealing is not honest-services fraud. Skilling expressly declined to extend § 1346 to it.
• A conflict of interest is not honest-services fraud. Failing to disclose a financial interest, without a bribe or kickback, is outside the statute.
• A breach of fiduciary duty is not, standing alone, a federal crime. The duty must have been breached through a bribe or kickback.

Percoco then addressed who can owe the duty. The trial court had instructed the jury, following the Second Circuit’s Margiotta line, that a private citizen owes the public honest services if he “dominated and controlled any governmental business” and “people working in the government actually relied on him because of a special relationship he had with the government.” The Court held that standard “too vague,” asking: “Is it enough if an elected official almost always heeds the advice of a long-time political adviser? Is it enough if an officeholder leans very heavily on recommendations provided by a highly respected predecessor, family member, or old friend?”

Percoco is regularly overstated in both directions, so the holding is worth stating precisely. The Court did not hold that a private citizen can never owe a duty of honest services. It said the opposite: “we reject the argument that a person nominally outside public employment can never have the necessary fiduciary duty to the public,” and pointed to genuine agency relationships as a source of one — “an agent of the government has a fiduciary duty to the government and thus to the public it serves.” What Percoco requires is that the duty be defined “with the clarity typical of criminal statutes.”

Kousisis: what the 2025 decision actually did

In Kousisis v. United States, the defendants obtained painting contracts on Pennsylvania transportation projects by falsely representing that they would use a disadvantaged business enterprise as a supplier. They performed the painting work satisfactorily. The Commonwealth got what it paid for. The defendants argued that without an intent to cause economic loss there could be no fraud.

The Court disagreed. The holding: “A defendant who induces a victim to enter into a transaction under materially false pretenses may be convicted of federal fraud even if the defendant did not seek to cause the victim economic loss.” The reasoning is textual: “the wire fraud statute is agnostic about economic loss. The statute does not so much as mention loss, let alone require it. Instead, a defendant violates § 1343 by scheming to ‘obtain’ the victim’s ‘money or property,’ regardless of whether he seeks to leave the victim economically worse off.”

The Court also foreclosed the argument that fraudulent inducement was right-to-control in new clothing: “Unlike the right-to-control theory, fraudulent inducement does not treat ‘mere information as the protected interest.’ Rather, it protects money and property.”

The defense-side significance of Kousisis lies in what it left open. The Court “reiterate[d] ‘that materiality of falsehood is an element of’ — and thus a limit on — the federal fraud statutes,” and said flatly that “[a] conviction premised on the fraudulent-inducement theory cannot be sustained without it.” It then declined to decide what materiality means in this setting — whether the traditional “natural tendency to influence” test applies, or something closer to an essence-of-the-bargain standard. Justice Gorsuch, concurring in part, argued that the benefit-of-the-bargain rule “is not some vestigial limb” and “plays an important role in separating mere lies from criminal frauds.”

That is where this area is now being litigated: not whether loss is required, but how material a misrepresentation must be when the victim received full value.

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Element two: intent to defraud

Wire fraud is a specific-intent offense. The government must prove the defendant acted knowingly and with intent to defraud — that is, with intent to deceive and to deprive the victim of money or property.

This is where most winnable wire fraud cases are won, because intent is the element least susceptible to proof by document alone. The recurring defense themes:

• Good faith. A genuine belief in the truth of a representation defeats intent, and it does not have to be a reasonable belief to be genuine — though the less reasonable it is, the less likely a jury is to credit it.
• Reliance on professionals. Advice of counsel, an accountant’s sign-off, an auditor’s acceptance of a treatment, a regulator’s non-objection. Advice of counsel is a formal defense with formal requirements — full disclosure of the material facts to the lawyer, and actual reliance — and asserting it waives privilege over the subject matter. That trade-off has to be evaluated early.
• Disclosure. Risk that was disclosed cannot have been concealed. Offering documents, contracts and correspondence that disclose the very thing the indictment calls hidden are the most useful documents in the file.
• Business failure is not fraud. Optimistic projections that did not come true, a venture that collapsed, money spent on a business that failed — none is fraud without evidence of intent at the time of the representation.
• Puffery and opinion. Statements of opinion and sales talk are not actionable false statements of fact.

The temporal point matters as much as the substantive one. Intent must exist at the time of the representation. Evidence that the defendant later behaved badly, or that the venture later failed, does not establish intent when the statement was made — although the government will invite exactly that inference, and the jury instruction on this point is worth litigating.

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Element three: materiality

Materiality is an element, even though the statute does not use the word. Neder v. United States, 527 U.S. 1, 25 (1999): “we hold that materiality of falsehood is an element of the federal mail fraud, wire fraud, and bank fraud statutes.” The Court inferred it from the common-law meaning of fraud.

The general standard, which Neder took from Gaudin and Kungys, is that “a false statement is material if it has ‘a natural tendency to influence, or [is] capable of influencing, the decision of the decisionmaking body to which it was addressed.'”

After Kousisis, materiality carries weight it did not previously have to bear. When loss was thought to be an implicit limit, materiality could be treated as a formality. Now that loss is confirmed not to be an element, materiality is the principal doctrinal constraint on the fraudulent-inducement theory — and the Court said so while declining to define it. Expect this to be the live issue in wire fraud litigation for the next several years.

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Element four: the wire (or the mailing)

The jurisdictional element is the weakest limit in the statute, and it is why so much commercial fraud is federal.

What counts. Any transmission by wire, radio or television in interstate or foreign commerce: an email, a text message, a wire transfer, a card authorisation, a phone call, an upload, an automated bank message. It need not contain anything false. It need not be sent by the defendant. It need only be caused, and be in furtherance of the scheme.

How far “in furtherance” reaches. Schmuck v. United States, 489 U.S. 705, 710–11 (1989), holds that “the use of the mails need not be an essential element of the scheme. It is sufficient for the mailing to be ‘incident to an essential part of the scheme,’ or ‘a step in [the] plot.'” Routine, innocent mailings qualify: the Court confirmed that “‘innocent’ mailings — ones that contain no false information — may supply the mailing element.” And the analysis is fixed at the time of the act: “The relevant question at all times is whether the mailing is part of the execution of the scheme as conceived by the perpetrator at the time, regardless of whether the mailing later, through hindsight, may prove to have been counterproductive.”

Where the limit still is. A transmission that occurs after the scheme has reached fruition, and that does not further it, does not satisfy the element. Mailings or wires that are merely the mechanical aftermath of a completed fraud — post-transaction accounting, for instance — remain contestable. In practice this argument succeeds rarely, but where a count rests on a single late-dated wire it is worth making, because losing that count may take a limitations problem with it.

Why this makes almost any fraud federal. Consider an ordinary commercial misrepresentation entirely within one state. The buyer pays by card; the authorisation crosses state lines. The parties email; the message routes through an out-of-state server. Either is enough. The practical effect is that federal jurisdiction over commercial fraud is close to universal, and the decision whether a case is federal is made by prosecutors, not by the statute.

Venue and counting. Each qualifying wire is a separate count. That is why fraud indictments have twenty or forty counts arising from one scheme: the government has charged the emails. It also drives venue, since a wire fraud prosecution may generally be brought in any district in which a qualifying transmission originated, passed through, or was received.

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Conspiracy: § 1349, not § 371

A wire fraud indictment will almost always include a conspiracy count, and it will almost always be brought under 18 U.S.C. § 1349 rather than the general conspiracy statute. Section 1349 provides that anyone who “attempts or conspires to commit any offense under this chapter shall be subject to the same penalties as those prescribed for the offense, the commission of which was the object of the attempt or conspiracy.”

Two differences from § 371 matter. Section 371 requires that “one or more of such persons do any act to effect the object of the conspiracy” and caps at five years. Section 1349 requires no overt act — United States v. Roy, 783 F.3d 418, 420 (2d Cir. 2015): “proof of an overt act is not required for a conspiracy conviction under 18 U.S.C. § 1349” — and carries the same maximum as the completed fraud. The reasoning follows Whitfield v. United States, 543 U.S. 209, 214 (2005). A fuller treatment of the distinction is on our white collar crime lawyer hub.

The practical consequence for a wire fraud defendant is that “I never did anything” addresses an element that is not in the statute. What matters is the scope of the agreement — what this defendant knew and agreed to — and that question controls both liability and the loss figure at sentencing.

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“Affects a financial institution”: the phrase that doubles everything

Six words in § 1343 and § 3293 carry more consequence than any other language in the wire fraud statutes. If a wire or mail fraud “affects a financial institution,” three things change at once: the maximum rises from 20 years to 30, the fine ceiling rises to $1,000,000, and the limitations period doubles from five years to ten. It is the highest-leverage contested question in a large share of federal fraud cases, and it is barely discussed on competing pages.

It is an element, not a sentencing factor

The Fourth Circuit held in United States v. Ubakanma, 215 F.3d 421, 425–26 (4th Cir. 2000), that “the aggravating circumstance available here — whether the wire fraud crime ‘affects a financial institution’ — constitutes an offense element and thereby creates a distinct wire fraud offense.” That is not a technicality. It means the fact must be charged in the indictment and proved to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt, not found by a judge by a preponderance at sentencing. Where an indictment invokes the thirty-year tier without pleading facts establishing the effect on the institution, that is a defect worth raising before trial.

Mere use of a bank is not enough

Ubakanma also decided the substantive question for the Fourth Circuit: a wire fraud offense “‘affected’ a financial institution only if the institution itself were victimized by the fraud, as opposed to the scheme’s mere utilization of the financial institution in the transfer of funds.” Fraud proceeds that merely passed through a bank account do not, on that reasoning, convert an ordinary wire fraud into a thirty-year offense.

But risk of loss counts, even without actual loss

The Tenth Circuit reached a broader reading of the parallel limitations provision in United States v. Mullins, 613 F.3d 1273, 1278–79 (10th Cir. 2010). Congress “could have extended the limitations period only when wire fraud ’causes a loss’ to a financial institution,” the court reasoned, but “it chose instead to use the considerably broader term ‘affects.'” A “new or increased risk of loss” is therefore “plainly a material, detrimental effect on a financial institution.” Mullins held the ten-year period applied even though the fraudulent loans at issue “were paid off before the fraud was discovered,” because “[t]hat looming possibility of harm, even if ultimately not realized, was enough.”

The two decisions are less opposed than they first appear, and the point where they meet is the useful one for defense work. Mullins itself acknowledged an outer limit, citing Ubakanma: “‘[M]ere utilization of a financial institution’ as a conduit for funds with no attendant risk of loss to the institution, for example, might not do it.” And it endorsed the trial court’s instruction that “[m]ere use of a financial institution in a scheme to defraud is not enough to demonstrate that the financial institution was affected by the wire fraud.” Mullins also recognized that at some point the influence on an institution becomes “so attenuated, so remote, so indirect that it cannot trigger the ten-year limitations period.”

Fact pattern	Likely outcome
Proceeds routed through the defendant’s own bank account; the bank bears no risk	Not “affected” — a conduit, per Ubakanma, 215 F.3d at 426
Fraudulently induced loans that the institution might not have recovered, even if repaid	“Affected” — new or increased risk of loss, per Mullins, 613 F.3d at 1279
Fraud on a wholly owned subsidiary whose loss would pass through to a parent bank	“Affected” — risk passes through, per Mullins, 613 F.3d at 1279–80
An effect so remote or indirect it cannot meaningfully be called an effect	Not “affected” — Mullins recognizes an attenuation limit, 613 F.3d at 1279

Table: how courts have drawn the “affects a financial institution” line. Circuits differ in emphasis; check the law of the charging district, because the answer decides both the limitations period and a ten-year swing in the statutory maximum.

Limitations, in summary

The general federal period is five years under 18 U.S.C. § 3282(a). Section 3293 extends it to ten years for a violation of “section 1341 or 1343, if the offense affects a financial institution,” and for bank fraud, bank embezzlement and loan-application false statements outright. Where the government has charged conduct from six, eight or nine years ago, whether it can do so at all frequently turns on this single phrase — which makes it one of the few genuinely dispositive pre-trial motions available in a fraud case.

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How the government proves a wire fraud case — and how that proof is attacked

Federal fraud trials have a recognizable shape, and knowing it is part of preparing for one.

Cooperating witnesses. Nearly every multi-defendant fraud case rests on someone who has already pleaded and is testifying under a cooperation agreement. That witness supplies the narrative the documents cannot: what was said in the room, what everyone understood. Cross-examination is directed at the agreement itself — the charges dropped, the guideline exposure avoided, the § 5K1.1 motion the witness is hoping for, and the fact that the value of the testimony to the witness rises with how damaging it is.

Summary charts. The government will offer a summary exhibit under Fed. R. Evid. 1006 consolidating thousands of transactions into a single chart with a total at the bottom. The chart is often the most persuasive thing the jury sees. It is also built on selection choices — which transactions were included, which were treated as fraudulent, what was netted out — and those choices are examinable. The underlying records must be made available, and a summary that assumes the conclusion is objectionable.

The causation instruction on the wire. The government does not have to prove the defendant intended a particular transmission. Mullins states the standard, quoting Pereira: the evidence must show the defendant did “an act with knowledge that the use of the wires will follow in the ordinary course of business, or where such use can reasonably be foreseen, even though not actually intended.” Whether that standard was met on a specific charged wire — particularly a late-dated or peripheral one — is a genuine sufficiency question, and knocking out a single count can carry a limitations problem with it.

Intent by inference. Because there is rarely direct evidence of intent, the government proves it circumstantially: concealment, unusual entity structures, lulling communications, personal benefit, and departures from ordinary practice. Each of those has an innocent explanation in some cases, and the defense work is to supply the explanation contemporaneously — from the documents that already existed — rather than to construct it at trial.

Multiplicity and severance. A forty-count indictment charging forty emails from one scheme is not forty frauds. Multiplicity challenges rarely succeed outright, but the prejudicial effect of the count structure on a jury is a legitimate basis for argument, and in multi-defendant cases severance under Fed. R. Crim. P. 14 is worth pressing where the evidence against a peripheral defendant would be swamped by evidence about others.

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What wire fraud gets charged alongside

Wire fraud is the connective tissue of federal white-collar prosecution. It rarely appears alone.

• Money laundering. If proceeds moved through an account, § 1956 or § 1957 counts usually follow, and the two are far from interchangeable — see our money laundering attorney page for why § 1957 is the easier charge for the government to prove.
• Bank fraud. Where a financial institution is involved, § 1344 is generally charged in parallel, with its own elements and its own case law: bank fraud attorney.
• Tax offenses. Unreported proceeds generate tax exposure; the willfulness standard there is different and more favorable to defendants than the fraud standard. See tax fraud lawyer.
• Securities fraud. Where securities are involved, wire fraud is charged alongside 15 U.S.C. § 78j and Rule 10b-5, or 18 U.S.C. § 1348. That is the subject of our securities fraud attorney page.
• Health care fraud. Billing cases are charged under § 1347 with wire fraud counts attached: healthcare fraud attorney. Where the billing is to a federal program the counts multiply again, into Medicare fraud, Anti-Kickback and Stark and False Claims Act exposure, each with its own standard of proof.
• Investment fraud. A collapsed fund or a payout funded from new investor money is charged as wire fraud first and characterized as a scheme second: Ponzi scheme defense.
• Insider trading. Trading cases almost always carry § 1343 counts alongside the securities counts, because the wire statute has no scienter definition to litigate: insider trading defense.
• Embezzlement and program fraud. Where federal money or a federally funded organization is involved, §§ 641 and 666 appear: embezzlement lawyer.

The multiplicity is not accidental. It increases the guideline calculation through grouping rules, and it gives the government room to concede counts in plea negotiation without conceding exposure.

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Sentencing exposure

The statutory maximum is not the operating number. Wire and mail fraud are referenced to U.S.S.G. § 2B1.1, and the offense level is driven by the loss amount: base level 7 for a twenty-year-maximum offense, plus an increase from the loss table that runs from 2 levels at more than $6,500 to 30 levels at more than $550,000,000. “Loss” is the greater of actual or intended loss, a definition that now appears in the Notes to Table within the guideline text rather than in commentary.

Two current points matter for a wire fraud defendant:

1. Amendment 836, effective 1 November 2025, struck § 2B1.1 Application Note 21 in its entirety — including the downward-departure note for cases in which the offense level “substantially overstates the seriousness of the offense.” Chapter Five, Part H is listed in the 2025 Manual as “[Deleted].” Mitigation arguments that used to be framed as departures must now be framed as variances under 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a). The facts are unchanged; the vehicle is not.
2. Intended loss can exceed actual loss by a wide margin in inchoate or interrupted schemes, and the guideline says so expressly: intended loss “includes intended pecuniary harm that would have been impossible or unlikely to occur.” Contesting what the defendant “purposely sought to inflict” — as opposed to the face value of documents the government has totalled — is frequently the highest-value work in the case.

We do not predict sentences and we will not tell a reader what range applies to them. The guideline calculation, the loss findings and the § 3553(a) analysis are individual. Our federal sentencing pages set out how the calculation is built and where it is contested.

Two things that come after sentencing are worth knowing about at the front end, because eligibility for both is shaped by decisions made at the plea and sentencing stage rather than afterwards: the First Step Act earned time credit and placement rules, and compassionate release under 18 U.S.C. § 3582(c)(1)(A). Neither is a sentencing argument, and neither is something this page can tell any reader they qualify for.

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If you are under investigation for wire fraud

The order of operations matters more here than in most federal cases.

1. Do not speak to agents without counsel. A voluntary interview creates evidence that did not previously exist, and 18 U.S.C. § 1001 exposure attaches to the interview itself independently of the underlying case.
2. Preserve everything. Deleting or altering documents after learning of an investigation converts a defensible fraud case into an obstruction case, which is far harder to defend and carries its own enhancement.
3. Get the theory identified early. Which property? In whose hands? Object or byproduct? If the answer is “valuable economic information,” Ciminelli is dispositive. If it is “regulatory prerogatives,” Kelly is. If it is honest services without a bribe or kickback, Skilling is.
4. Assess the financial-institution question. It controls both the ten-year limitations period and the thirty-year maximum.
5. Map the parallel proceedings. A civil regulatory case, an SEC matter or a private suit arising from the same facts creates immediate Fifth Amendment problems that need to be managed before anyone testifies anywhere.

Where a conviction has already been entered, an invalid-theory claim is a direct-appeal issue in the first instance — see federal appeals — and a § 2255 motion where it depends on facts outside the record or arises from an intervening decision. Elizabeth Franklin-Best, P.C. is a federal criminal defense attorney practice handling federal fraud matters nationwide, at trial and on appeal.

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Frequently Asked Questions About Wire Fraud Charges

Reviewed for legal accuracy by Elizabeth Franklin-Best, Esq., Principal Attorney·September 2026