On March 26, 2017, Jeffrey Ansted herded his family into a private plane bound for the Cayman Islands. The owner of an Ohio-based telecommunications company, Ansted had purchased the Cessna 525C jet one year earlier for $8 million. It had since become his go-to method of commuting to Florida, where he owned a condo and belonged to yacht and country clubs, as well as to his son’s lacrosse games in Towson, Maryland. For local travel, he drove a $250,000 Ferrari.

The trip to the Caymans was the last junket Ansted took before he was busted for fraud in 2018 by the Federal Communications Commission, which found that he had paid for his lavish lifestyle, including the jet and Ferrari, by embezzling millions from the agency’s Universal Service Fund (USF), a little-known program that subsidizes phone and internet access for low-income customers.

Ansted had signed up dead people for service and even fabricated social security numbers in order to obtain subsidies from the program. Then he’d transferred those subsidies from his company, American Broadband, into a personal account, according to a public notice from the FCC.

"It would be hard to describe a more brazen or textbook example of fraud, particularly when the entire purpose of the … program is to benefit low-income individuals," then-FCC commissioner Brendan Carr, who is now the chairman, said in a statement at the time. American Broadband was fined more than $63 million, the largest such penalty in agency history.