Tag: identity theft

Another Democrat Official Caught in Federal Corruption Case

Federal prosecutors in Detroit unveiled new charges on Thursday that expose yet another case of corruption within the Wayne County government. 

Jontae Jackson, a 45-year-old former taxpayer assistant in the county treasurer’s office, was charged with bribery, conspiracy, and aggravated identity theft. 

According to court documents, Jackson pocketed nearly $18,000 in bribes in exchange for illegally removing properties from the county’s tax foreclosure list.

Prosecutors allege that Jackson worked with Zina Thomas, 61, a former director at the United Community Housing Coalition, a nonprofit organization aimed at protecting struggling Detroit homeowners. 

Instead, Thomas conspired to steal more than 30 properties from low-income residents, using forged quitclaim deeds, fake driver’s licenses, and fraudulent residency documents. 

Jackson would process the documents, remove the properties from foreclosure, and Thomas would flip the homes without the consent of the rightful owners.

The scheme lasted from March to September 2023, and prosecutors say it preyed on Detroiters who were already at risk of losing their homes. 

At least $17,950 in bribe payments were funneled to Jackson. Both she and Thomas are expected to plead guilty, with potential prison sentences of up to ten years.

This scandal is not an isolated incident. It comes on the heels of a wave of public corruption cases in Michigan. 

Just this month, former Inkster Mayor Patrick Wimberly was sentenced in a bribery scheme involving a strip club shakedown. 

Earlier in August, Saif Alsenad, the former government and public affairs director of Wayne County, was charged with lying to the FBI during a bribery investigation. 

These cases paint a bleak picture of Michigan politics, where local government officials repeatedly betray the trust of the very citizens they are sworn to serve.

Unfortunately, Michigan is far from alone. Across the country, similar cases of corruption and abuse of power are surfacing. 

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Elon Musk Drops Bombshell — Says Arrest Is Imminent ‘Today’ in Massive Social Security Theft Involving 400,000 Stolen Identities and Financial Fraud Scheme

In a stunning revelation Monday night during a tele-town hall with Wisconsin voters, Elon Musk warned that an arrest is “imminent” in a massive Social Security fraud scheme involving the stolen identities of over 400,000 Americans.

The theft, Musk claimed, is part of a sophisticated financial theft operation tied not only to illegal immigrants defrauding U.S. social welfare systems—but also to widespread voter fraud enabled by the Democrat Party’s open-borders agenda.

Speaking directly to voters in the Badger State, Musk painted a grim picture of a government drowning in incompetence and corruption.

“The government has got the thorniest computer problem I’ve ever seen,” he said.

“Thousands of systems—many of them are very, very old systems. Some of the software is older than me.”

He slammed decades-long boondoggles like the IRS modernization project, started in 1995, which bureaucrats perpetually claim is “five years away” from completion. “These projects are just ridiculous,” Musk said.

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Woke Oregon county commissioner charged with 8 felonies for allegedly stealing from 83-year-old in fraud scheme

An Oregon county commissioner has been charged with several felonies for allegedly stealing from an elderly victim in a major fraud scheme. Melissa Fireside, 43, a Democrat, was arraigned on charges Wednesday. She is a newly elected Clackamas County Commissioner representing District One.

Fireside faces eight felony charges including first-degree theft, first-degree aggravated theft, two counts of identity theft, two counts of computer crimes, and two counts of first-degree forgery, according to court filings. The commissioner has been accused of taking financial advantage of an 83-year-old man while accessing a computer network. She allegedly forged the victim’s name on documents to steal his funds, per the indictment. The total stolen amounted to tens of thousands of dollars over a series of at least eight separate criminal incidents.

Fireside is being prosecuted by the Oregon Department of Justice. She has also been accused of forging the signature of Democrat state Rep. April Dobson, who represents Happy Valley, to steal the victim’s funds. A Clackamas County judge ordered Fireside to have no contact with both the victim and Dobson during Wednesday’s hearing. She was not remanded to custody.

According to the indictment, Fireside “unlawfully and knowingly accessed a computer for the purpose of committing theft of money.” This included forging or altering several promissory notes: one for $29,000 and another for $30,000. The first recorded criminal act occurred on September 16, 2024, according to court documents.

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IRS Failed To Properly Dispose of Sensitive Tax Documents, Report Finds

Earlier this year, a federal judge sentenced a former IRS contractor to five years in prison for leaking the tax returns of multiple high-profile billionaires. The case involves genuine wrongdoing by someone entrusted with people’s private information. But a new report from the U.S. Treasury Department found the IRS itself was routinely negligent with taxpayer documents in its possession.

“The IRS receives and creates a significant volume of sensitive documents and is responsible for protecting these sensitive documents from receipt to disposal,” according to a report from the U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA). Specifically, federal agencies must “shred, burn, mulch, pulp, or pulverize sensitive documents beyond recognition and reconstruction.”

The TIGTA report notes that since 2009, the IRS has contracted with an unnamed “outside national vendor” to do this. The vendor provides IRS facilities with locked bins to store sensitive documents, which are later picked up to dispose of the documents securely.

This vendor services “387 (75 percent) of 514 IRS facilities,” the report notes, while another 17 facilities contract with local companies. But for the rest, it’s apparently a free-for-all: “We found that the IRS is unaware of what sensitive document destruction capabilities are in place for the 110 facilities not covered under a contract. For example, the IRS initially thought the Andover, Massachusetts, facility was covered by a local sensitive document destruction contract. After we inquired about the contract, the IRS discovered that this facility was not covered by any contract.”

When the auditors then performed a site visit at that facility, they found “trash containers being used for all waste, including sensitive documents that contained tax information and Personally Identifiable Information.”

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Ohio Meat Processing Company “Fresh Mark, Inc.” Agrees to Pay $3.7M Penalty for Employing Migrant Workers Using Stolen U.S. Citizens’ Identities

Fresh Mark, Inc., an Ohio-based meat processing company, has entered into a non-prosecution agreement (NPA) with federal authorities after its hiring manager orchestrated a scheme involving aggravated identity theft and obstruction of justice.

This agreement allows the company to avoid criminal prosecution in exchange for meeting certain criteria, including paying a penalty and implementing a compliance and ethics program.

The case, centered on Fresh Mark’s Salem facility, revealed that Yelwin Omar Munoz-Solis, a hiring manager, actively participated in a conspiracy to steal the identities of U.S. citizens.

These stolen identities were then handed to illegal immigrants seeking employment at Fresh Mark’s processing plants. Munoz-Solis not only facilitated the fraudulent hiring but also falsified I-9 documents to deceive federal authorities about the employees’ eligibility to work in the United States.

Between 2013 and 2018, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) agents exposed Fresh Mark’s hiring practices, leading to the detention of 146 illegal aliens employed at the company’s facilities in Salem, Massillon, and Canton.

Thirty of these individuals faced federal charges for immigration violations, but the scandal didn’t stop there.

The company’s complicity in the fraudulent scheme was cemented when Munoz-Solis pleaded guilty to multiple charges, including conspiracy and aggravated identity theft.

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The IRS Is Required To Protect Kids From Identity Theft. They’re Not Complying.

Children are surprisingly frequent victims of identity theft—around 25 percent of them will experience identity fraud or theft by the time they reach adulthood. The consequences of bad credit caused by fraud are both steep and difficult to reverse. Thankfully, the government is required to alert child victims of identity theft. However, it is failing to meet these obligations, leaving easy paths for identity theft open.

The IRS is legally required to inform parents if their child’s identity is being used to commit tax fraud. But according to Shoshana Weissmann, the digital director for the R Street Institute, a free-market think tank, the IRS has refused to do so because the kids in question don’t have active tax accounts.

Kids in foster care are also particularly vulnerable to identity theft. In an attempt to remedy this, federal law requires states to run credit checks on foster kids over the age of 14, but most eligible children have not received these checks. “Even those who received any or all reports received little help understanding them,” Weissmann notes. “And few children facing identity fraud receive any help resolving it.”

The Social Security Administration (SSA) doesn’t make things much better. Since most possible Social Security numbers have already been given out, a criminal who makes up a number has better than even odds that it is already in use or about to be assigned to someone else. Instead of taking steps to fix this vulnerability, Weissmann writes that the SSA doesn’t check whether a number has been used in fraud before assigning it—leaving newborns saddled with bad credit histories from birth.

The stakes of this negligence are high. “More than half of minors who were victims of identity theft report being denied access to credit at least once because of it, and some deal with the consequences for a decade or more,” Weissmann writes. “Some have even acquired a lifelong criminal record for an offense committed by the thief that stole their identity.”

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Lauren Boebert’s son pleads guilty to attempting to commit identity theft: reports

Tyler Boebert, Rep. Lauren Boebert’s (R-CO) eldest son, charged with I.D. theft and going on shopping sprees by swiping stolen credit cards, pleaded guilty to a single charge for attempting to commit identity theft, according to news reports.

Authorities said Tyler Boebert, who previously told the judge he was “working things out” to be able to afford an attorney in his criminal case, was caught with his three underage pals on surveillance camera marauding around Rifle, Colorado, breaking into people’s cars, taking any credit cards they had inside, and using them to go on a shopping spree.

Tyler Boebert ultimately copped to one charge, and the judge considered his lack of prior criminal conduct in sentencing. He also took a letter from Lauren Boebert herself into consideration, according to Courthouse News.

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These Are The Most Prevalent Forms Of Cyber Crime

Owed in part to the pandemic-induced increased shift from offline to online, cyber attacks have become a lucrative avenue for criminals in recent years. 

As Florian Zandt reports, Statista experts estimate global losses of $7.1 trillion in 2022 compared to 2019’s $1.2 trillion, with crypto exchange and protocol hacks by prolific groups like the state-affiliated North Korean hacking team Lazarus dramatically increasing in the years 2021 and 2022 according to Chainalysis. While the number of hacks and the damage caused has been on a constant uptick, the types of cyber attacks have shifted dramatically in the past five years.

In 2017, roughly 42 percent of recorded cyber crimes were connected to non-payment or non-delivery.

This category includes purchases made via fraudulent online stores that never materialize and promised payments never arriving.

Personal data breaches and phishing scams constituted an additional 28 percent, while identity theft, credit card fraud and other cyber attacks had a relatively low share in all reported cyber crimes.

Five years later, phishing has become the most prevalent cyber attack. This past year, more than half of criminal online activity was connected to this long-running type of cyber crime.

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Florida cop charged with using dead man’s credit card information to buy fast food, gas, and hotel stay

A police officer in Florida was arrested with her handcuffs and charged with stealing a dead man’s credit card information to purchase fast food, according to the Osceola County Sheriff’s Office.

St. Cloud Police Officer Dianne Ferreira, 25, stands accused of theft of credit card information with intent to use, fraudulent use of a credit card over $200, and use of the personal ID of a deceased person. Her arrest was announced Tuesday during a joint press conference held by the OCSO and the SCPD.

“She was an officer, but she doesn’t deserve that title now,” St. Cloud Police Chief Doug Goerke said on Wednesday.

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US Postal workers arrested in $1.3 million fraud and identity theft scheme, authorities say

Three US Postal employees are among four people arrested in connection with a $1.3 million fraud and identity theft scheme allegedly carried out in New York and New Jersey since 2018, according to the Department of Justice.

A further five people facing changes in connection with the case remain at large, it said.

The individuals are accused of stealing credit cards from the mail and using them to buy merchandise at a variety of stores, including high-end retailers in New York and New Jersey, authorities said.

They are then said to have sold some of the merchandise on the website LuxurySnob.com, according to a statement from the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

US postal workers Nathanael Foucault, Johnathan Persaud, Fabiola Mompoint, and civilian Devon Richards were arrested on Thursday, according to the statement.

Officials said five other people face charges, including Conspiracy to Commit Access Device Fraud, Access Device Fraud, and Aggravated Identity Theft charges, and each face lengthy prison sentences if found guilty.

“The defendants took advantage of the public trust we place in US Postal Service employees for their own financial gain,” US Attorney Damian Williams said in a statement. “Thanks to the diligence of USPIS (the Postal Inspection Service), the NYPD, and USPS-OIG (the Office of the Inspector General), the defendants will now be held accountable for their brazen criminal conduct.”

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