Investigations

Richard Bernstein pleaded guilty to steering E-Rate kickbacks

Consultants sharing his surname filed for $3.3 million in internet aid within weeks of the Brooklyn plea.

Richard Bernstein pleaded guilty on Jan. 22, 2026, to steering federal E-Rate contracts to vendors that paid him kickbacks, and consultants using his name kept filing for millions in school internet aid anyway. Tyler Oliveira posted a field investigation on Sept. 20, 2026, that walked public funding forms and confronted administrators who certified the bills.

E-Rate pays for internet and classroom technology at schools with enough low-income students, using money drawn from fees on phone bills. Consultants help yeshivas and other schools file Form 471 applications with the Universal Service Administrative Company. When a school qualifies, Washington can cover up to 90 percent of the service cost.

Bernstein ran E-Rate Consulting and E-Rate Management Solutions from Woodmere, New York. According to investigators, he secretly split vendor profits after connecting a Nassau County school to a supplier in 2021 and 2022. The Universal Service Administrative Company paid the vendor $68,000 on Jan. 28, 2022, and the vendor wired $11,500 back to Bernstein's firm 11 days later. He admitted to more than $100,000 in kickbacks and agreed to forfeit $137,576.64.

Oliveira reported that five days after the guilty plea, a fresh school application for E-Rate internet aid carried Bernstein's signature. Within 10 weeks, consultants sharing the Bernstein surname submitted more than 140 applications seeking about $3.3 million across 13 states, while Richard Bernstein remained off the program's public debarment list.

The pattern matched an older Rockland County case federal prosecutors called a $14 million fraud against the same program. In 2018, seven defendants pleaded guilty in the Southern District of New York to fake bidding, inflated equipment, and consultant kickbacks tied to private religious schools. Simon Goldbrener, a consultant at the center of that case, kept filing applications for years after his 2020 guilty plea until the FCC debarred him from E-Rate and other universal service programs in March 2026, a decade after the FBI raids.

Oliveira and his team pulled state corporate filings and matched them to 2026 Form 471 data. They identified 10 internet vendors listed as competitors on yeshiva bids while Aaron Kraut's name appeared on paperwork for nine of the companies, including pairs incorporated a day apart that later won work at the same Brooklyn school. Oliveira wrote to Kraut, then filmed at addresses on file; men who would not give their names told him to leave the sidewalk.

He knocked on school doors in Brooklyn, Lakewood, New Jersey, and Rockland County to ask administrators why they certified single-bid prices far above market rates. At Young Elementary in Brooklyn, staff referred questions to consultant Ari Dove Bernstein and declined to discuss a $4,250 monthly circuit. Rabbi Eli David certified about $17,000 a month across four Yeshiva Lev Shalom locations and said he had priced several companies, though the public form listed only one bidder. At Yeshiva Ateret Yakov in New Square, a large crowd followed Oliveira through the street after he tried to reach consultant Robert Schnitzkin about wireless and firewall requests totaling millions since 1998.

Oliveira also flagged schools where student counts on discount forms did not match equipment budgets on the same application, including one Brooklyn site that swore 100 percent poverty on one page and listed more than twice as many pupils on another. Prosecutors in the 2018 case recovered written contracts in which some administrators split vendor profits with suppliers; Oliveira found no new criminal charges tying today's schools to similar payments, and most officials he reached declined to answer.

Across 633 bid requests Oliveira cataloged from the public record, 93.7 percent drew one response or none, and 47 schools swore nobody answered their ads while keeping the incumbent vendor. The network of filings he tracked has requested more than $43 million since 2017 and collected over $15 million, with about $5.7 million still pending in 2026 applications. Richard Bernstein's January plea covered conduct through September 2022, but the government's charging papers said kickback deposits to his firm continued into August 2024.

Source video: I Exposed a Jewish Fraud Ring Stealing From Poor Kids...