We have all heard of the stories about dead people voting in elections and some of them voting a couple times.  Now 2 men have taken dead people to a new extreme.

The 2 men, Haroon Amin and Ather Ali, were very enterprising.  They have stolen the identities of people who have died and then filed income tax returns for them requesting income tax refunds.  They searched the internet for social security numbers and people that had died.  Next they created false W2′s showing taxes withheld and requesting their refunds be sent to an address that they controlled.

The Internal Revenue Service has admitted that they were able to catch these 2 entrepreneurs but not before some refunds had been paid.  The computer fraud software was apparently able to sniff out the fraud… could it have been because all the returns were asking for the refund to be sent to the same address in another country?

The Internal Revenue Service was able to locate the 2 men and they were arrested.

The false returns, allege prosecutors, claimed more than $2 million in tax refunds.

The IRS says it rejected most of the false refund claims, but it did send out some checks (no specifics were provided by the agency) that went to addresses the government says were controlled by Amin and other co-conspirators.

Most of that money, according to the feds, then was transferred to bank accounts in Armenia and Pakistan.

Amin’s sentencing is set for June 22. He could get up to five years in prison and a maximum fine of $250,000.

His co-defendant Ali is scheduled to go to trial in early March.

So what is to be learned here?  Don’t mess with the IRS  or dead people.  Pay your fair share of taxes and protect your identity even when you die.  This could only happen in America!

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