The ringleader of a fraudulent tax preparation business named Ariel Jimenez was punished for 12 years in prison for selling stolen identities of thousands of minors on welfare. The tax fraudster also aids its customers by falsely claiming tax credits, resulting in millions of tax losses.
Jimenez’s customers used stolen identity information such as names, birthdates, and SNNs to add the children’s information as dependents on their tax returns to acquire a refund when they file their taxes.
He also organised a business behind the tax fraud scheme and identified theft conspiracy more than a decade ago in New York.
The tax fraudster sold the identities to other scammers who profited from the same scheme.
Ariel Jimenez and his co-conspirators began to sell the identities of numerous minors, from NYC’s Human Resources Administration fraud investigator to thousand of scammers profiting from a similar campaign.
An investigation revealed that the fraudsters had engaged in large-scale identity theft and tax fraud campaigns through identifying minors, including names, DoBs, and SSNs, obtained through payments to a corrupt NYC employee.
The suspect’s operators charged a cash fee and tax preparation charges to prepare and file tax returns that wrongly claimed that an individual taxpayer had one or more minor dependents to take fraudulent advantage of at least a single tax credit. Hence, the motion will inflate the refund given to the false taxpayer.
Jimenez has allegedly earned over a million dollars in the previous years by selling more than a thousand stolen identities of minors. The defendant referred to these troves of information as pollitos which roughly means “little chickens.”
Furthermore, he profited hundreds of thousands of dollars by preparing fraudulent tax returns for his patrons. The defendant used the earnings of these schemes to purchase different luxurious items such as cars, jewelry, and real estate.
Jimenez is also a hustler and a heavy gambler. Moreover, the defendant’s use of stolen identities risked the actual guardians of the children who were fraudulently claimed as dependents. In other instances, the people who cared for the affected children badly needed the tax refunds, but it was delayed because of the fraudulent activities done by Jimenez.
