Honduran illegal alien Amado Valdez-Morales headed a scheme involving at least four businesses which scammed $10.8 million in tax credits from the U.S. Treasury over a two year period.
Amazingly, Valdez was deported six months into this plot but found his way back into the U.S. to continue tapping American taxpayers.
One of Valdez’s co-conspirators, a Guatemalean, has not yet been caught.
In 2012, Dale alleges, Valdez, the unidentified Guatemalan fugitive and other co-conspirators, some of whom have not been identified in this particular indictment, launched a scheme to “steal as much money as possible from the United States Treasury and the U.S. taxpayers through exploiting” this program.
First, they filed fake applications and bogus Mexican, Honduran and Guatemalan identification, “frequently using the names of persons who did not even exist,” the indictment stated. Blair and her employees “prepared false and fraudulent income tax returns” that typically spanned three tax years and claimed child dependents, Dale wrote.
When checks arrived in the mail, Valdez and a band of recruits, including some from North Carolina, would cash them at the businesses owned by Carvajal, Ayala and Vargas using “poorly designed and obviously fake” foreign identification, the indictment stated. The trio of business owners took a 14 percent cut of each check as did Valdez. It’s not clear how much the recruits received. The unidentified fugitive presumably got the rest.
So far, the feds have managed to recover only $500,000 of the $10.8 million stolen.
