A citizen of the Dominican Republic and former resident of
New York pleaded guilty yesterday to theft of government property, aggravated
identity theft, money laundering, conspiracy to commit money laundering,
fraudulent use of a social security number, and failure to appear as ordered,
all in connection with his involvement in a stolen identity tax refund fraud
scheme, announced Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Richard E.
Zuckerman of the Justice Department’s Tax Division and U.S. Attorney Lelling
for the District of Massachusetts.
According to court documents, in 2012, Hector Antonio
Cruz-Mercedes, attempted to negotiate ten U.S. Treasury income tax refund
checks totaling $75,808 generated from false tax returns filed in the names of
stolen identities of Puerto Rican residents.
Cruz-Mercedes also conspired to lauder the proceeds of the scheme by
texting bank account deposit information to others involved in the scheme. Cruz-Mercedes was indicted in February 2014
and arrested in the Dominican Republic in January 2017, and later extradited to
the United States.
Cruz-Mercedes’s sentencing is scheduled for Jan 8,
2019. He faces a statutory maximum sentence
of ten years in prison for the theft of government property, a maximum of
twenty years in prison for the money laundering conviction, a two year
mandatory minimum prison term on the aggravated identity theft charge, five
years in prison for the fraudulent use of a social security number, and five
years for the failure to appear as ordered.
He also faces a period of supervised release, restitution and monetary
penalties
Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Zuckerman and
U.S. Attorney Lelling thanked special agents of the Internal Revenue Service
Criminal Investigation Homeland Security Investigation, and the United States
Secret Service in Boston, who conducted the investigation, and Senior
Litigation Counsel Corey J. Smith of the Department of Justice, Tax Division,
who prosecuted this case.
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