A Lehi man was sentenced to 57 months in prison for a credit card scheme, the U.S. Attorney’s Office announced Thursday.

Timothy Gibson, 48, was charged by a New Jersey federal court with conspiracy to commit wire fraud for taking part in a multimillion-dollar credit card fraud scheme and for making false statements to a bank as part of actions that took place in Utah, per a release.

Gibson previously pleaded guilty to one count of a five-count indictment accusing him of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. He also pleaded guilty to three counts of making false statements to a bank.

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Gibson and his conspirators made over $8 million from the fraudulent scheme, in which they solicited straw credit card applicants by offering to purchase credit card offers the applicants received in the mail.

Gibson and his conspirators then asked the applicants to provide personal info, which they used to open several credit cards in the names of fake businesses with falsified financial and employment information. The credit card account information was sent by the conspirators in exchange for payment.

The U.S. Attorney’s office said Gibson also used his business’s credit card merchant account to charge the fraudulent credit cards for illegitimate sham purchases in an effort to gain rewards points.

The conspirators “added themselves to the credit card accounts as users, and transferred rewards points to accounts they controlled. The conspirators cancelled the points-generating purchases before the credit card payment was due,” the release said.

Over 8,000 fraudulent accounts in the names of over 1,500 straw cardholders were involved in the conspiracy, from which Gibson and his conspirators earned more than 800 million rewards points, equating to over $8 million.

The attorney’s office also said that, in 2020, Gibson falsely reported the number of employees and the average monthly payroll of a business he was associated with to receive a loan through the Paycheck Protection Program, which was established by the CARES Act in March 2020 in wake of the COVID-19 outbreak.