Omid Tahvili
Iranian con artist
Omid Tahvili (Persian: امید تحویلی; born on 31 October 1970, in Kermanshah, Iran) is an Iranian-Canadian sexual offender and kingpin of an organized crime group in Canada that is connected to various international crime organizations. In April 2008, Forbes.com, after consulting with law enforcement agencies around the world, listed him as one of the world's ten most wanted fugitives.
Criminal activities
Drugs
According to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), Tahvili came to Canada from Iran in 1994. In November 2000, he was arrested with his brother-in-law for possession of 3 kilograms (6.6 lb) of cocaine, in a joint operation between the Vancouver Police and the RCMP. Tahvili was found not guilty. By 2003, the RCMP recognized Tahvili as heading up one of the main criminal organizations operating out of an Iranian community in Canada. At that time, dozens of Iranian expatriates were working under him.
Fraud
From 1999 to 2002, he ran a fraudulent telemarketing business that targeted people in the United States, stealing approximately US$3 million from hundreds of victims, most of them elderly. A federal arrest warrant was issued for Tahvili on January 30, 2003 by the U.S. District Court, Central District of California, where he was charged with mail fraud, wire fraud, telemarketing fraud and aiding and abetting.
Tahvili was arrested in British Columbia on an extradition warrant and was eventually ordered extradited to the United States of America by the British Columbia Supreme Court on May 4, 2007. Tahvili had been represented by Canadian criminal and extradition lawyer Amandeep Singh, known for his representation of high profile and controversial international clientele such as billionaire banker fugitive Rakesh Saxena.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Omid Tahvili” as iranian con artist. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as iranian con artist. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q706047. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1970, 2008, 1994 and 2000.
Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Omid Tahvili” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.