8th person guilty in tax-debt scam.

Last two defendants scheduled for LR trial in December

An eighth person in a 10-person indictment pleaded guilty Tuesday in Little Rock to being part of a conspiracy to steal millions of dollars from about 7,000 people by falsely claiming to be government debt collectors.

The latest plea leaves only two men, both Cuban nationals, facing a jury trial scheduled to begin Dec. 11 in the Little Rock courtroom of U.S. District Judge Billy Roy Wilson. One of them, Lazaro Hernandez Fleitas, remains a fugitive.

The conspiracy, in which people pretending to be IRS agents threaten by phone to arrest or sue someone who can’t immediately wire money to pay a supposed tax debt, has occurred across the country, resulting in indictments in at least three states. In Arkansas, a federal grand jury indicted two people in 2016 and then added eight more defendants in 2017, charging each with conspiring to commit wire fraud.

Since then, most of those charged in Arkansas have pleaded guilty and are awaiting sentencing. On Tuesday, one of the lower-level players in the Arkansas case, Elio Carballo Cruz, 41, of Miami, pleaded guilty as well.

He admitted being part of a group led by Yosvany Padilla, 27, with whom he was arrested in Florida in April 2017. Padilla pleaded guilty in January, saying that between March 2015 and March 2016, he was responsible for coordinating, producing and distributing false identification documents for other co-conspirators.

Conspirators have admitted using the false identification documents to masquerade as U.S. Treasury Department employees to collect cash that had been wired from other states through money transfer services.

Most of the transfers were made through Walmart-2Walmart wire services because they required recipients to supply only a name and address to collect the funds, a federal agent testified last year.

The agent said an official-sounding caller would persuade victims to go immediately to the nearest Walmart store and wire a specific amount of money to a supposed IRS official in another state.

The caller threatened victims that if they didn’t send the money immediately, they would be arrested within two hours or a lawsuit would be filed against them by day’s end, the agent said.

Once the money was sent — usually while the caller remained on the line — the unknowing victim would give the caller a transaction number.

Runners, who were stationed in various general areas across the country, would then be sent to collect the money, and often collected from multiple locations in an area in a single day, the agent said.

He noted that different stores were chosen so as to avoid drawing attention to the runner and to avoid the cash at any one location from being depleted, which would require runners to wait nervously while the cash was replenished.

On Sept. 26, Wilson is scheduled to sentence Dennis Delgado Caballero, 40, who was the first person in the Arkansas case to plead guilty last year.

Caballero was one of seven people, including Cruz, who were arrested in April 2017 in Miami and West Palm Beach, Fla., after their names were added to the Arkansas indictment.

In 2017, authorities said the conspirators had stolen nearly $9 million altogether from intimidated taxpayers in 29 states and the District of Columbia.

There have been recent reports that the scheme is still going on.