The life of an identity thief seems so complicated. All the detail mining and document falsification and track covering and making sure one of your victims isn’t United States Attorney General Eric Holder and…Ahhh crap!
According to the Justice Department, Tadesse and another co-defendant swiped names and Social Security numbers from websites and used them to file the false tax returns, seeking fraudulent refunds, between 2012 and 2013.
The returns claimed, incorrectly, that the individuals worked at Wal-Mart — and that refunds should be loaded onto debit cards, to be sent to the same Georgia mailing address.
One of the returns used the identity of Eric Holder, who does not work at Wal-Mart.
According to the DOJ, there is “no indication” Holder was specifically targeted because of his position. Rather, his information may have been obtained from “publicly available websites.”
Yafait Tadesse has been sentenced to a year and a day in prison and ordered to pay a fine of $4,014 to the IRS. His unnamed partner in crime pleaded guilty previously but has yet to be sentenced.