A man has been sentenced to two years in state jail for stealing $1.8 million from Oregon’s carbon credits program through a phony electric vehicle charging scam.
Merlin K. Thompson pled guilty to racketeering, tax evasion, and first-degree theft in Multnomah County Circuit Court and was arrested as the gavel fell during a Tuesday hearing.
He declined to address Judge Andrew Lavin. A prosecutor from the Oregon Attorney General’s Office issued just brief statements, stating that Thompson had “taken accountability.”
Lavin ordered Thompson, 55, whose last known home is an apartment complex in Tillamook, to repay the entire amount. The judge fixed the repayment schedule at $50 per month, citing Thompson’s indigence.
In a plea agreement, Thompson admitted to making a “false material statement” to a government agency and using ill-gotten riches from his firm, Thompson Technical Services, to buy vehicles and motorbikes, some of which he later resold.
According to an investigation conducted by the Oregon Capitol Chronicle in 2023, Thompson began submitting false reports to the state Department of Environmental Quality in 2022, claiming to be running three electric vehicle charging stations in Sheridan.
According to the Chronicle, Thompson stated that the charges were eligible for the state’s Clean Fuels Program, a four-year-old initiative that requires fossil fuel businesses to reduce emissions by 37% by 2035. The corporations can do so in part by purchasing carbon credits from ecologically beneficial projects such as EV chargers.
According to the Chronicle, the chargers sat abandoned and unplugged in a back lot, never being used, even though the DEQ issued Thompson carbon credits, which he auctioned for $1.8 million.
DEQ spokesman Lauren Wirtis stated that the agency is now more closely scrutinizing all new Clean Fuels Program participants and has limited the number of credits that can be issued to a single EV charger each quarter.
“The agency has done several rounds of reviewing all the electricity reporting in the last three years to search for other anomalous reporting,” she said. “Those reviews have turned up reporting errors but no similar cases of fraud.”
