Its for the children
Via Watch Dog
It’s tax-time, which means it’s open season for Florida fraudsters.
Thursday, the good guys got even.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida announced 25 people involved in 19 separate schemes were charged with stealing identities. Thousands of identities were reportedly stolen, all with the intent to dupe the government out of millions of dollars in bogus tax refunds.
FBI special agent George L. Piro said tax related ID-theft is alarmingly easy to pull off.
“Identity theft, the fastest growing crime here, is as easy as one, two, three. One, criminals steal someone’s name and Social Security number; two, they use that identity of file a fraudulent tax return online; three, they collect the refund check. Repeat thousands of times,” Piro said.
The Federal Trade Commission ranked Florida first among states for identity theft in 2013. A press statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office on Thursday said identity theft in Miami has reached “near epidemic proportions.”
In one instance, three people conspired to steal the identities of Miami-Dade County public school students. The plan involved using a student database that defendant Pamela Rhim-Grant, a food service worker at Horace Mann Middle School, could access. Officials say more 400 student identities have been stolen across Miami-Dade County over the past year or so.
Another case involves a former mailman, Marlon Maikel Palacios, who allegedly provided fraudsters with addresses from his mail route. Fake Internal Revenue Service tax returns were subsequently filed using those addresses and, according to the complaint, Palacios pulled IRS related correspondence, including refund checks, and delivered them to his co-conspirators for money.