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.
