A Bend business owner who promised to sell custom-made brewery equipment to 23 businesses across the United States but took their money and never shipped the products was sentenced Tuesday to nearly two years in federal prison. Matthew Mulder, 52, also was ordered to pay $887,116 in restitution. He pleaded guilty in April to four counts of wire fraud and three counts of mail fraud.
“People get into business all the time and it collapses because of bad decisions. This became criminal the minute you just started lying to everybody about the delivery of equipment that was never going to come and the results were catastrophic,” U.S.
District Judge Michael J. McShane told Mulder. The judge ordered Mulder, who remains out of custody, to surrender to the U.
S. Marshals Service on April 8, allowing him time with his wife who is undergoing chemotherapy. Mulder in 2014 co-founded the Bend-based WeCan Brewing Systems that offered microbrew systems, keg washers and other industrial brewing products to customers across the country.
WeCan Brewing, though, began falling behind on its orders just a few years after it started operations, according to court records. Mulder had companies sending him down payments for products but then wouldn’t deliver on the orders and strung along his customers with unmet promises or simply stopped responding to their inquiries, according to Assistant U.S.
Attorney Gavin W. Bruce. In June 2018, for example, a customer wrote WeCan a $7,500 check to buy a k.
