A Cobb County man has been sentenced in connection to his scheme to obtain the personal information of school district employees in Connecticut.
Olukayode Ibrahim Lawal was sentenced on Tuesday to about 10 months in prison — time he’s already served — by Unites States District Court Judge Jeffrey Meyer in New Haven, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Connecticut said.
Lawal was indicted in May 2018 and pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud in December.
According to prosecutors, an FBI cyber crime squad and the IRS discovered that Lawal, of Smyrna, used phishing emails and sent requests to various school districts in 2017 to get employees’ personal information and file fraudulent tax returns in their names.
Lawal, 36, appeared on federal prosecutors’ radar when a Groton Public Schools employee received an email, appearing to be from a co-worker, asking for W-2 tax information for all system employees.
The employee who received the email responded to the request by sending personal information of about 1,300 employees, the office said.
Once that information was in Lawal’s hands, the Internal Revenue Service received about 100 suspicious Form 1040 filings from those employees. Those tax returns, the U.S. Attorney’s office said, claimed $491,737 in refunds.
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The IRS only processed about three of those returns, which resulted in $23,543 in refunds being deposited into bank accounts. The remaining returns were not processed because the feds suspected they were fake.
Federal prosecutors also revealed that Lawal, a Nigerian national, ran a similar scam on a hospital in which 33 fraudulent tax returns were filed. Those efforts were unsuccessful in claiming $314,184 in refunds.
Lawal came to the United States on a visitor’s visa in November 2016, but did not leave on his scheduled departure date of Dec. 1, 2016. Connecticut prosecutors said Lawal, who is in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, will be deported to Nigeria.
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