A murder-for-hire plot culminated in the arrest of an entrepreneur in Las Vegas after the target was warned of the plans and alerted the authorities, according to the FBI.
Fereidoun Khalilian is an entrepreneur whose Instagram sports 135,000 followers and also brands him as an entertainment agent. The page is filled with photos of him with multiple celebrities, including musicians, actors and influencers.
Khalilian was arrested by the FBI in Las Vegas on June 22, and he is accused of murder-for-hire, according to a criminal complaint provided by the bureau.
The complaint said Khalilian used his social media to project an “image of wealth” through the posts.
Authorities said that the target of Khalilian’s murder-for-hire scheme told the FBI that Khalilian attributed his wealth to being a royal prince from the Middle East, calling himself “Prince Fred” to people and on social media.
But the victim told authorities that he believed Khalilian did not garner his wealth from a royal lineage, but instead was “a con man that accumulated wealth through deception,” according to the complaint.
The target used to work for Khalilian in 2009 as an IT specialist for his telemarketing company, the complaint said. The company was shut down for conning people out of thousands of dollars, according to the Federal Trade Commission.
The Federal Trade Commission website links Khalilian to two cases of fraud in two telemarketing companies, including My Car Solutions. The final order in the 2010 case banned him from telemarketing, according to the commission.
The former IT specialist later went to California and got into the film industry, according to the complaint.
After running into Khalilian in 2019 in Los Angeles, the target researched Khalilian online and found out about the multiple cases of fraud he was linked to, according to the complaint. This intrigued him, and the man decided to produce a documentary on Khalilian’s life of “fraud and deception,” according to the complaint.
The man interviewed Khalilian for the documentary over five days, and he told authorities that he convinced Khalilian the documentary would be good for publicity and minimized that the film would be an exposé.
While researching for the documentary, the complaint said the producer talked to Khalilian’s bodyguards, investors and fraud victims.
In March, he then called Khalilian over 20 times from spoofed numbers over two weeks, saying nothing or greeting Khalilian in one or two words. In one of those calls, the producer recorded Khalilian calling him by name and threatening to mutilate and kill him, among other threats.
On March 17, a former bodyguard for Khalilian called the man and warned him that Khalilian was paying him $20,000 to kill the documentary producer, according to the complaint.
That day, Khalilian received a picture from the former bodyguard of the documentary producer laying facedown in a pool of blood with his hands tied behind his back. But the producer was not dead in the picture, according to the criminal complaint.
Khalilian’s former bodyguard and the producer faked the documentary producer’s death, the FBI said.
The complaint said the victim contacted the FBI and reported the murder-for-hire scheme on March 21. The bureau then monitored the bodyguard’s messages with Khalilian, Khalilian’s payments to the bodyguard and recorded their calls.
After his arrest on June 22, Khalilian was transferred to California District Court, where he is due back for a status check on Monday ahead of his jury trial in early September, according to court records.
