Luther Clay, Josephine Cowles and Glen Apling are three U.S. citizens who all died in 1983. Somehow they and over 1,000 other deceased individuals managed to file tax returns in 2006.
“It’s a very, very sophisticated scheme,” Arizona’s district U.S. Attorney, Dennis Burk, said at a press conference Thursday morning.
Burk’s office began investigating this bizarre story after a tipster came forward about an elaborate scheme using computers, tax returns and almost 2,000 real Social Security numbers; most of them belonged to people who were dead.
“Daniel David Rigmaiden was the leader of a sophisticated scheme in Arizona and elsewhere to defraud the United States from $4 million by e-filing fraudulent tax returns in the names of 1,900 taxpayers, the majority of whom were deceased,” Burk said.
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