Man Charged With Wire Fraud And Id Theft

CONTACT:      Barbara Burns
PHONE:         (716) 843-5817
FAX:            (716) 551-3051 

ROCHESTER, N.Y.--U.S. Attorney William J. Hochul, Jr. announced today that a federal grand jury has returned an eight-count indictment charging Emmanuel Guobadia, 41, formerly of Atlanta, Georgia, with wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. The wire fraud charge carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison, a fine of $250,000 or both, and the aggravated identity theft charge carries a maximum penalty of two years in prison which would run consecutively to the sentence imposed for the wire fraud violation.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Tiffany H. Lee, who is handling the case, state that according to the indictment, the defendant committed fraud against the Internal Revenue Service by electronically filing false and fraudulent income tax returns and claiming refunds to which he was not entitled. The case came to the IRS’s attention when it was discovered that a bank account in the Western District of New York was being used to facilitate the attempted refund claims for over 600 fraudulent tax returns, claiming over $1,200,000 in fraudulent tax refunds. The IRS refunded and deposited over $178,000 into this bank account. The investigation revealed that between May 2012 and July 2012, for 37 of the over 600 false claims which resulted in refunds to the bank account in the Western District of New York,  most of the money was then wired to the defendant’s bank account in Georgia.
The indictment is the culmination of an investigation on the part of Special Agents of the Internal Revenue Service, Criminal Investigations, under the direction of Shantelle Kitchen, Special Agent in Charge of the New York Field Office.

The fact that a defendant has been charged with a crime is merely an accusation and the defendant is presumed innocent until and unless proven guilty.