A Desert Hot Springs woman was sentenced to a two-year federal prison term for a tax-return scam where she used dead people’s names and their social security numbers to get almost $90,000 in bogus tax refunds.
45-year-old Angelique Mobley was sentenced Monday in the U.S. District Court in Riverside to two years in the clink and ordered to pay $77,000 restitution to the IRS.
Charges claim that between January 2011 and November 2012, Mobley filed false tax returns with the names and social security numbers of dead people found in an online database using TurboTax. Mobley and a man named Jeffrey West also stole information from people’s trash cans and promised to pay homeless people in exchange for their social security numbers, reports The Desert Sun.
West filed a total of 73 false returns with $89,808 in refunds.
As part of her plea bargain, Mobley admitted to using some of the money she received from the IRS to buy narcotics.
West died in February.
