{"id":21541,"date":"2017-11-10T08:30:47","date_gmt":"2017-11-10T13:30:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/?p=21541"},"modified":"2017-11-10T08:30:47","modified_gmt":"2017-11-10T13:30:47","slug":"alabama-resident-convicted-in-stolen-identity-refund-fraud-schemes-that-sought-26-million-postal-employees-provided-mailing-addresses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/2017\/11\/10\/alabama-resident-convicted-in-stolen-identity-refund-fraud-schemes-that-sought-26-million-postal-employees-provided-mailing-addresses\/","title":{"rendered":"Alabama Resident Convicted in Stolen Identity Refund Fraud Schemes That Sought $26 Million – Postal Employees Provided Mailing Addresses"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alabama Resident Convicted in Stolen Identity Refund Fraud Schemes That Sought $26 Million<\/strong><\/em>
\nStole IDs of Soldiers Deployed in Afghanistan, Alabama Teenagers and State Prisoners<\/em><\/p>\n

11\/09\/17 – A Phenix City, Alabama resident was convicted today by a federal jury sitting in Montgomery, Alabama in two stolen identity refund fraud schemes, announced Acting Deputy Assistant Attorney General Stuart M. Goldberg of the Justice Department\u2019s Tax Division and U.S. Attorney Louis V. Franklin, Sr. for the Middle District of Alabama.<\/p>\n

William Anthony Gosha III, a\/k\/a Boo Boo, was convicted of one count of conspiracy, 22 counts of mail fraud, three counts of wire fraud, and 25 counts of aggravated identity theft.<\/p>\n

According to the evidence presented at trial, between November 2010 and December 2013, Gosha ran a large-scale identity theft ring with his co-conspirators, Tracy Mitchell, Keshia Lanier, and Tamika Floyd, who were all previously convicted and sentenced to prison.\u00a0 Together they filed over 8,800 tax returns with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) that sought more than $22 million in fraudulent refunds of which the IRS paid out approximately $9 million.\u00a0\"\"<\/p>\n

In November 2010, Gosha stole IDs of inmates from the Alabama Department of Corrections and provided the IDs to Lanier who used the information to seek fraudulent tax refunds.\u00a0 Gosha and Lanier agreed to split the proceeds.\u00a0 Gosha also stole employee records from a company previously located in Columbus, Georgia.\u00a0 In 2012, Lanier needed an additional source of stolen IDs and approached Floyd, who worked at two Alabama state agencies in Opelika, Alabama: the Department of Public Health and the Department of Human Resources.\u00a0 In both positions, Floyd had access to the personal identifying information of individuals, including teenagers.\u00a0 Lanier requested that Floyd primarily provide her with identities that belonged to sixteen and seventeen year-olds.\u00a0 Floyd agreed and provided thousands of names to Lanier and others at Lanier\u2019s direction.<\/p>\n

After receiving the additional stolen IDs, Gosha recruited Mitchell and her family to help file the fraudulent returns.\u00a0 Mitchell worked at a hospital located at Fort Benning, Georgia, where she had access to the personal identification information of military personnel, including soldiers who were deployed to Afghanistan.\u00a0 She stole soldiers\u2019 IDs and used their information to file fraudulent returns.<\/p>\n

In order to electronically file the fraudulent returns, Gosha, Lanier, and their co-conspirators applied for several Electronic Filing Identification Numbers (EFIN) with the IRS in the names of sham tax preparation businesses.\u00a0 Gosha, Lanier, and their co-conspirators then used these EFINs to file the returns and obtain tax refund related bank products from various financial institutions, which provided them with blank check stock.\u00a0 Gosha and his co-conspirators initially printed out the fraudulently obtained refund checks using the blank check stock.<\/p>\n

However, the financial institutions halted Gosha\u2019s and his co-conspirators\u2019 ability to print checks, and as a result they recruited U.S. Postal employees who provided Gosha and others with addresses on their routes<\/strong> to which the fraudulent refund checks could be mailed.\u00a0 In exchange for cash, these postal employees collected the refund checks and provided them to Gosha, Lanier, Mitchell and others.\u00a0 Gosha also directed tax refunds to prepaid debit cards and had them sent to addresses he controlled.\u00a0 Gosha used the prepaid cards to withdraw the refunds.<\/p>\n

In addition, between January 2010 and December 2013, Gosha participated in a separate stolen identity refund fraud scheme with Pamela Smith and others, in which Gosha sold the IDs that he had stolen from the Alabama Department of Corrections to Smith and others.\u00a0 Smith and others used the IDs to file returns that sought approximately $4.8 million in fraudulent refunds of which the IRS paid out approximately $1.85 million. \u00a0Smith was previously convicted and sentenced to prison.<\/p>\n

Chief U.S. District Court Judge Watkins did not set a date for sentencing.\u00a0 Gosha faces a statutory maximum sentence of 10 years in prison for the conspiracy to file false claims, a statutory maximum sentence of 20 years in prison for each count of wire and mail fraud and a mandatory minimum sentence of two years in prison for the aggravated identity theft.\u00a0 The defendant also faces a period of supervised release, restitution, forfeiture and monetary penalties. He was remanded into custody.<\/p>\n

Acting Deputy Assistant Attorney General Goldberg and U.S. Attorney Franklin commended special agents of Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, who conducted the investigation, and Trial Attorneys Michael C. Boteler and Gregory P. Bailey of the Tax Division and Assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathan Ross of the Middle District of Alabama, who are prosecuting the case.<\/p>\n

Additional information about the Tax Division\u2019s enforcement efforts can be found on the division\u2019s website.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alabama Resident Convicted in Stolen Identity Refund Fraud Schemes That Sought $26 Million Stole IDs of Soldiers Deployed in Afghanistan, Alabama Teenagers and State Prisoners 11\/09\/17 – A Phenix City, Alabama resident was convicted today by a federal jury sitting in Montgomery, Alabama in two stolen identity refund fraud schemes, announced Acting Deputy Assistant Attorney […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19149,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-breaking","last_archivepost"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21541","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21541"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21541\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21542,"href":"https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21541\/revisions\/21542"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19149"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/postalemployeenetwork.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}