A Burnsville man defrauded a California electronics business out of more than $1.2 million by posing as someone who could broker big deals with high-profile companies, according to federal charges.

Thomas Thanh Pham, 52, was charged this week in U.S. District Court in Minneapolis with three counts of wire fraud in connection with a scheme that targeted the San Jose business starting in 2019 and lasting into the following year.

Pham appeared in court Thursday and remains free on a personal recognizance bond ahead of another hearing on Tuesday. Court records do not list an attorney for him. Pham declined Friday to speak with the Star Tribune about the allegations.

According to court documents:

Pham, as CEO of Enterprise Products, purported to provide consulting and financial services to commercial clients involved in engineering and manufacturing.

Pham presented himself as a broker with supposed business relationships with large, well-known companies and claimed he could arrange service agreements between an electronic manufacturing services company based in San Jose — not identified in public court records — and business affiliates in the electronics and technology sectors.

In June 2019, Pham proposed that Enterprise Products could facilitate multimillion-dollar contracts with large companies such as RetailNext, Siemens and Texas Instruments.

Pham supplied his client with bogus documents, including fabricated contracts, correspondence and business proposals. Pham required that his client pay a "deposit bond" of $1.278 million on a pledge that the company would gain millions of dollars in repair service business including $38 million in a deal with RetailNext, a global provider of analytics to brick-and-mortar retailers.

"Pham also arranged for an associate of his to pretend to be a RetailNext executive in negotiation meetings with [his client's] CEO and Pham," the federal indictment read.

In support of the scheme, Pham arranged the delivery to his client of about 20 samples of electronic devices that supposedly required repairs. However, Pham covered up that the samples had been stolen.