Friday, October 10, 2014

NJ man sentenced to prison for $65 million tax scheme

A New Jersey man has been sentenced to 17 months in prison for filing more than 8,000 fraudulent income tax returns that sought $65 million from the government. David Pinski and a handful of others conducted the largest and longest running stolen identity refund fraud scheme to have been identified, and resulted in a loss of $12 million to the U.S. government.

Pinski obtained personal identifies of Puerto Rican citizens and used that information to file electronic 1040s. He and his co-conspirators then received the fraudulent tax refund checks, cashed and spent them. Some of the defendants gambled more than $250,000 at casinos, and “resided in a house worth more than $1.6 million” while supposedly working in a grocery store, says an article published by the Cliff View Pilot.

The fraud was discovered because the tax forms were filed electronically from a handful of traceable IP addresses.