Nigerian Babatunde Olusegun Taiwo was sentenced to 48 months in prison on Thursday for filing more than 2,000 fraudulent tax returns that claimed over $12 million in refunds

The sentence was announced by Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Richard E. Zuckerman of the Justice Department’s Tax Division and U.S. Attorney Jeffrey B. Jensen for the Eastern District of Missouri.

Taiwo is a resident of St Louis in the state of Missouri.

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According to documents and information provided to the Court, Babatunde Olusegun Taiwo, co-conspirator Kevin Williams and others, “engaged in a scheme to file false tax returns in the names of individuals whose personal identifying information they obtained without authorization”.

In particular, Taiwo, Williams, and others accessed from a data breach at a payroll company the information of hundreds of individuals, including school district employees in Alabama and Mississippi.

The co-conspirators then used the information to file false tax returns with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). They sought to conceal their fraud by filing the tax returns under electronic filing identification numbers that the IRS issued to tax return preparation businesses that they obtained without authorization.

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