Accused to judge: Led scam

IRS fakers stole $9M across U.S.

A Cuban man who has been jailed in Arkansas since late April admitted Wednesday to a federal judge in Little Rock that he led a group of people that has stolen $9 million from about 7,000 people across the country by pretending to be IRS employees collecting tax debts.

U.S. District Judge Billy Roy Wilson accepted a guilty plea to a charge of wire-fraud conspiracy from Yosvany Padilla, 27, one of seven Cuban citizens arrested in Florida in late April after being indicted in the Eastern District of Arkansas.

The Arkansas indictment, like others handed up in 2016 and 2017 by federal grand juries in Minnesota, Mississippi and Texas, alleges that conspirators falsely claiming to be Internal Revenue Service employees would call people and intimidate them into wiring cash to “agents” in other states under threat of arrest or other legal action.

Padilla admitted being involved in the Arkansas conspiracy between March 2015 and May 2016. He acknowledged that he was

responsible for coordinating, producing and distributing false identification documents for other co-conspirators, including Dennis Delgado Caballero, 39, of Miami and Jeniffer Valerino Nunez, 21, a Cuban — who have pleaded guilty to participating in the scheme that is the focus of the Arkansas indictment.

Nunez admitted in July that she went to a Wal-Mart store in Lonoke on Dec. 9, 2015, posing as Natalie Moray, who was said to be a deputy secretary of the U.S. Treasury Department, to collect $3,720.30 that had been wired through the store’s Walmart-2-Walmart Money Transfer service from a man in Kentucky.

The Office of the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration received a telephone call on Dec. 14, 2015, from the Kentucky man, and was able to obtain an image taken by a store camera of Nunez collecting the cash, Assistant U.S. Attorney Hunter Bridges told Wilson.

Investigators then learned that an identification card for Moray was one of several aliases Nunez used when collecting cash at Wal-Mart locations across the country as part of the conspiracy, Bridges said. He said they also learned that Nunez regularly traveled with a man in a black car, who was also spotted in surveillance photos and turned out to be Caballero, who in May also admitted to being a part of the conspiracy.

Padilla, Nunez and Caballero are among 10 people indicted in the conspiracy in the Eastern District of Arkansas.

Bridges told the judge that in August 2015, the three traveled to Boston to train other people in how to carry out the scam. He said Padilla has collected more than 200 wire transfers in his real name in Florida, obtaining more than $200,000 from 120 victims altogether.

Padilla, represented by attorney

Leslie Borgognoni, was assisted in court by a translator but said he could speak a little English. He demonstrated that by answering, “Yes, I’m guilty,” after Bridges read details of the crime, and added a “yes” to Wilson’s question of whether what Bridges had said was true.

In a detention hearing in July for another of the Arkansas defendants — Angel Chapotin Carrillo, 42, of Hialeah, Fla. — Agent Floyd Orrell testified that Carrillo was able to travel easily across the country by plane and automobile, using false identities, to collect more than $1.3 million over 17 months through money-wiring services.

Orrell said the money was almost always wired through Wal-Mart stores because those services required recipients to supply only a name and address to collect the funds. He testified that an official-sounding caller persuaded victims to immediately go to the nearest Wal-Mart and wire a specific amount of money to a supposed IRS official in another state. The caller told victims that they otherwise faced arrest within two hours or would be sued by the end of the day.

Once the money was sent, sometimes using a smartphone app, the victim would give the caller the transaction number and a runner in the conspiracy would be sent to pick it up, Orrell said. Many runners were able to collect money from multiple locations in a single day, he said, noting that Carrillo once used the same alias, Ismael Horton, to collect 19 wire transfers in one day in Arkansas.

The agent testified that runners used different sites in the same area to avoid drawing attention to themselves and because sometimes the scheme depleted the cash at one location, which required the runners to wait — making them nervous — while the cash was replenished.

Wilson set Padilla’s sentencing for 1:30 p.m. April 4. He faces up to 20 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000 under federal statutes.