eCrimeBytes S 1 Ep 18: Anthony “Boo Boo” Gosha’s ID Theft Scheme

Sit back and listen to the story of Anthony William “Boo Boo” Gosha III’s ID theft scheme where he and 30+ other conspirators filed over 7,000 fraudulent tax returns, claiming more than $20 million in fraudulent payments.

This episode was also covered briefly in:

Anthony “Boo Boo” Gosha And Thirty Conspirators Sentenced For Multi Million Dollar Stolen Identity Tax Refund Fraud Scheme – eCrimeBytes Nibble #5

Sources:

Chapters:

0:00 Case details
7:35 Now On To Our Case…
12:35 Tax Preparer Background
14:28 Gosha’s Ladies Become Tax Preparers
16:55 7,000 Tax Returns!!!
23:33 Sends The Return To Her Own Address
26:03 That Stung
30:46 Gozsha Indulges
32:04 The Evidence
32:55 Next Level
34:31 Elizabeth Grant Is In!
35:40 Nice Work, Ladies!
36:15 Indictments
39:15 Keshia Lanier Pleads Guilty
40:35 Mass Sentencing
48:58 Gosha’s Indictment
49:58 Gosha Is Found Guilty And Sentenced
52:38 Conclusions

Transcript:

00:00:10:00 – 00:01:00:24
Keith
Hey, welcome to eCrimeBytes Season 1 Episode 18. This one is Anthony “Boo Boo”, and for you listeners I’m doing air quotes here, “Boo boo” Gosha’s ID theft scheme. And Boo Boo is the name that Anthony Gosha goes by on the street and we may use it throughout this episode. I know we’ll definitely be calling him Gosha, so get used to that name. And what we have here, and I kind of alluded to this in our if you listen to our last episode, I alluded to this. What we have here is the same type of fraud scheme that we talked about in our last episode, but there’s a lot of steroids involved. There’s a lot more people.

00:01:00:24 – 00:01:25:01
Keith
There’s like 30 plus conspirators. The amounts are much greater. We’re talking millions of dollars and they end up doing some things in the scheme, in the criminal scheme that I thought was pretty noteworthy. And I don’t want to jump the gun and give away what they did yet, but I’ll tell you, stick around because they did some pretty ingenious things here to get their money.

00:01:25:03 – 00:01:53:23
Keith
So let’s start with our case details like we always do, and I will go ahead with that. Seth, we are talking about pretty much the same thing as last episode where we have electronic tax filing. So again, if you’re from not from the U.S. at the end of the year when you need to settle up with the government because throughout the year you typically pay the government at the end of the year, you need to say, okay, this is actually how much I owe you, and sometimes it’s a refund back to you.

00:01:53:23 – 00:02:21:24
Keith
And sometimes you have to pay the government. It depends on how well you estimated throughout the year. That process is electronic tax filing. So that’s what the criminals used in this case to pull money from these stolen IDs, which is the second technology here, which is PII. We’re going to be saying that acronym throughout this episode. It stands for Personally Identifiable Information.

00:02:21:26 – 00:02:44:20
Keith
So what you have here is theft of PII or a theft of identifiable information, and then you have the crooks then using that to file fraudulent tax returns en mass. And this is going to be an amazing scheme that we described to you. And then they get their loot and end of the day they’re done. So you want tell us more about the crime.

00:02:44:22 – 00:02:44:28
Keith
Seth?

00:02:45:06 – 00:03:15:00
Seth
Sure. So this was, as Jones noted, a large scale operation of tax fraud, essentially using electronic tax filing. We’ll get into some of that detail. The crime took place from 2010 to 2014. The main crimes perpetrated were identity theft and tax fraud. But there was also this thing called SIRF and not as in longboard on the water. This is SIRF or stolen identity tax refund fraud.

00:03:15:02 – 00:03:24:24
Seth
So that’s actually, I guess a an area of law that was created because it needed to be so that yeah. Go ahead. Sorry.

00:03:24:27 – 00:03:45:24
Keith
I was going to say if you can’t tell we’ve come with a couple stories here of this is how people get, this is how they monetize identities, is they use tax refund fraud to pull money and put it in their pocket. And it happens so much that law enforcement has made a term for it. It’s called SIRF. And here we are.

00:03:45:25 – 00:03:49:23
Keith
We’re telling you what it is. We’ll put it on our glossary as well.

00:03:49:23 – 00:03:58:10
Keith
All right. The criminals in this case. All right. We have William Anthony Gosha III, not to be confused with first or the second.

00:03:58:12 – 00:04:07:05
Keith
He’s also known by Boo-Boo or just Boo or just Gosh. You take your pick. We’ll probably say Boo-Boo or Gosha.

00:04:07:08 – 00:04:36:12
Seth
I would have gone with WAG because those are his initials. Sounds way cooler than Boo-Boo, I think of Honey Boo-Boo. I’m not sure I want to be compared to that. And moreover, this is while I guess, as you said, the first and the second wags were not involved in this case, we do have some lineal family membership scenarios going on in this one, which I think is interesting, because if fraud is great, how about you bring your children in to commit the fraud with you. That’s even better right?

00:04:36:14 – 00:04:57:23
Keith
And in this case, there’s not just Gosh or Boo-Boo 30 other conspirators. So in a lot of these cases, we tried to give you all the names of the people as much as we can. This case, it’s way too hard. I’ve researched this case very deeply and I get lost in the names because there are so many people involved.

00:04:57:25 – 00:05:17:17
Keith
So in this case, we’re just going to be presenting mostly the relevant people to you. Try not to get too caught up on the name. We have a couple main players. There’s Gosha that we’re talking about and there’s a lady that’s coming up that will introduce you to you. And then there’s another individual at the end that you’ll find pretty interesting as well.

00:05:17:17 – 00:05:38:16
Keith
And those three individuals are the ones that will concentrate most on here. But I just want to note that there’s so many people involved. So when you see these numbers, there’s two things here in their crime. It’s a lot of people are taking money from that pot when they make that number, but then they also have a lot of hands being involved with the crime.

00:05:38:16 – 00:05:43:14
Keith
So they’re able to make the bigger numbers because there’s more people. Yeah, how about that?

00:05:43:15 – 00:06:14:15
Seth
So so the victims. So we have some victims from the Alabama Department of Corrections inmates. We have victims from an Alabama Department of Health database, anyone else that filed false returns in their name. And we’ll learn how many there were. It was shocking. And then generally, I would say the US government, the IRS and taxpayers who ultimately are footing the bill here, plus any legal, you know, ramifications, courts, court hearings and whatnot.

00:06:14:15 – 00:06:27:16
Seth
That’s all taxpayer money that need not have happened had Gosha Boo-Boo kind of gone to town here. So yeah I’d say those are the victims. Keith, tell us why we’re talking about this case today.

00:06:27:19 – 00:06:54:11
Keith
There’s a couple reasons. One is this was eCrimeBytes nibble number five. So this was a few weeks back. I published this as just a couple minutes update and it got a good response. So that was one reason. And the second reason I can’t tell you the reason yet, because there is a move that the criminals make in here that I don’t want to give away too quickly of how they get money.

00:06:54:11 – 00:07:17:19
Keith
Once the bank stopped them from the original plan, that was next level. And that was the main reason why I picked this case. So stick around. We’re going to we’re going to get into it. And it’s really interesting how they did it. And then lastly, I picked it because of the size 30 plus conspirators and they have this level of detail so that we can put the story together for it was just amazing.

00:07:17:19 – 00:07:41:26
Keith
And the size of the operation to me was amazing. So that’s the third biggest reason why I picked this. So with that, we are now skipping our front intro music. So if you thought you were just going to jump away, we’re getting straight into our case now. I’m going to get right into this case and tell you about some of the conspirators that are relevant that we’re going to be talking about.

00:07:41:26 – 00:07:45:04
Keith
So the first three,

00:07:45:04 – 00:07:58:19
Keith
they’re all the same family because all have the last name of Mitchell M I T C H E L L. There is Tracy, there’s Latasha. She’s also known as Tasha, and there’s Dameisha.

00:07:58:19 – 00:08:03:10
Keith
And Dameisha is also known as Meisha.

00:08:03:12 – 00:08:26:07
Seth
There’s a couple more people we need to know about. One is kind of one of the kingpins here. Her name is Keshia Lanier. She also goes by Keshia Gray and Keshia Williams, and she resides in Alabama and Georgia. There’s a fifth person named Maquetta Snell Dash Quick, who resides in Columbus, Georgia. And we’ll hear more about all these people in the coming slides.

00:08:26:09 – 00:08:38:22
Keith
For one second here. For our video viewers, this is Keshia Lanier. This is her mug shot and she looks pissed, wouldn’t you say Seth?

00:08:38:24 – 00:08:50:20
Seth
I mean, that was Smiley there. I also thought people to smile, but people who smile on their mug shots that tend to be kind of sociopathic. So I’m not I don’t want to hold that against her.

00:08:50:23 – 00:09:17:15
Keith
Yeah. So out of all the people, we’re going to be talking about her a lot. So she was the mug shot that was the easiest for me to find, too. So here she is. We promise you mug shots when we have them. And here’s one of them. Okay. We have another conspirator. Her name is Tamika Floyd. Now, Tamika resided in Salem, Alabama.

00:09:17:17 – 00:09:46:15
Keith
Now Tamika, between 2006 and May of 2013, worked at the Alabama Department of Public Health and immediately should go ding ding. Didn’t they just say something about Department of Health earlier on? Yep, we did, because this is this person is where one of the sources of identifiable information for individuals comes from. This is a source. So through her employment, just through her normal employment, she had access to tremendous amounts of PII.

00:09:46:17 – 00:09:50:04
Keith
This is how some of it got into the criminals hands.

00:09:50:04 – 00:10:19:20
Seth
Yeah. So let’s talk about Traci Mitchell. So she lived in a city called Phenix City, Alabama, and she was employed at a hospital on Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia. So she had access to PII of military individuals, and some of the military individuals were deployed to Afghanistan. So if you’re thinking about who’s the best kind of PII to steal from, it’s either probably people who are no longer on planet Earth or people who are not really around to realize that their PII has been used to commit crimes.

00:10:19:24 – 00:10:45:27
Seth
So why not deployed soldiers? Honor has no place here. So Tracy Mitchell though as we mentioned, brought her daughter is Meisha, (Dameisha) and Latasha (Tasha) into this scheme. I want to note here, Jones this is not the first now seems like a more or less all ladies brigade here which tip my hat to the ladies. They don’t want all the young white men getting are getting all the action here.

00:10:45:29 – 00:11:12:12
Keith
And they keep it in the family, too. In these tax refund schemes. Like I said, only one person tends to kind of burn enough collateral with their IRS or whatever that they tend to bring in more people to file these things. And you see aunts, uncles, sisters, brothers being pulled in. In this case, we have a mother bringing her two daughters into the scheme, which is yikes.

00:11:12:15 – 00:11:13:27
Seth
Yeah.

00:11:14:00 – 00:11:36:17
Keith
So then we have to Talarius Page and Patrice Taylor and they work together in a call center where they had PII. So if you’re keeping count, we have three different sources of PII. We have the military base that Seth just told you about. We had the Department of Health prior to that that I told you about. And now we have a call center with two individuals that they have access to every day.

00:11:36:17 – 00:11:44:01
Keith
And they just would keep information just like the other two and provide it to this group.

00:11:44:03 – 00:12:08:20
Seth
So a couple more people to know about. We had a Sharonda Johnson and a Cynthia Johnson mother daughter more yikes. Also in Phenix City, Alabama. And they both worked at a Wal-Mart in Columbus, Georgia. But their job at Wal-Mart was fairly unique. They weren’t, you know, stocking shelves or they weren’t at the cashier. They were check cashiers. And if you think about they also that had access to PII, right?

00:12:08:20 – 00:12:15:02
Seth
They had access to people’s names, their bank account information. So another source of PII for.

00:12:15:02 – 00:12:30:00
Keith
Sure that took me a while to find because they introduced these people, it just said that they were part of it but didn’t tell me why. And I kept having a search and search of search. And finally I figured out that they were check cashing. Sometimes court documents aren’t exactly.

00:12:30:02 – 00:12:30:23
Seth
Know, sometimes.

00:12:30:23 – 00:12:32:11
Keith
Chronological.

00:12:32:13 – 00:13:04:20
Seth
Right. Or fully informative. So I’ll take this one Keith. So the background here, let’s talk about tax preparation, resources or services. So several financial institutions, banks provide tax related bank products to tax preparation businesses. So these banks allow a tax preparer, right? So if you hire your accountant Johnny to did CPA Johnny to deduct their fees directly from a tax refund and have those fees directed to the tax preparers account.

00:13:04:20 – 00:13:23:18
Seth
So think of it this way. If you’re on TurboTax, fairly ubiquitous, I use it to prepare our taxes. You can actually say, You know what, I want? My accountant did my taxes for me, and while I’m going to file them, I want to make sure he gets paid, but I don’t want to pay them out of cash. I want to pay him out of the proceeds from my refund.

00:13:23:20 – 00:13:36:19
Seth
So this is a this is a product that is kind of built into tools like that, like TurboTax, and that is not actually from TurboTax or into it. That is actually from a bank.

00:13:36:21 – 00:14:04:08
Keith
And this is good. This is for normal, good purposes. What we’re describing to you, this isn’t something that criminals this is not special to the criminals. Any tax preparer would have products like this in order to provide it. And just to give you some numbers, like if I went to my tax preparer and they said, oh, we the government owes you $10,000, but it took us $1,000 worth of time to prepare this for you.

00:14:04:11 – 00:14:28:11
Keith
At the end of the day, what I typically see would be a $9,000 check coming from that tax preparer because they’re going to take their cut out. They’re going to do electronically the filing and all that kind of stuff, and it goes into their account and so forth. This is kind of like a convenience product that these tax preparers are given that the criminals then use for bad purposes.

00:14:28:14 – 00:14:37:18
Keith
So what do you think happens? What do you think happens? Gosha’s ladies become tax preparers because now they have access to all…

00:14:37:21 – 00:14:56:07
Seth
Hold on. What we just realized and Keith kind of just like, you know, so clearly while there’s many, many coconspirators here, we just gave you guys a bunch of names, Gosha’s like the head of the snake here. He’s the guy right? So just to make sure that that was clear, I’m not sure you know that, too. So what we’ve talked about, it makes that clear.

00:14:56:07 – 00:15:04:06
Seth
So who’s the head honcho here? It’s Gosha. We’ll find out. Well, the price he pays for that. But Keith, I apologize. Interrupted you. I just wanted to make sure that. No, no.

00:15:04:06 – 00:15:58:10
Keith
No, no. Definitely. I see this research day in and day out, and sometimes I forget that other people don’t see the same things that I’ve seen 100 times. So. William Anthony Gosha. Not the first, not the second, but the third. The third. He is Gosha. He’s the head of the snake that Seth just told you about. So I just kind of candidly called them Gosha’s Ladies, became tax preparers. So we’re talking about Keshia Lanier. Snell Quick and others, people that we’ve introduced to you and other people that are a little more minor that we haven’t introduced to you. They have become tax preparers and they get this thing that we’ve talked about to you before, called an electronic filing identification number or an EFIN if you spell it out and they make a bunch of tax preparation businesses, because if you’re going to if you’re going to do a criminal conspiracy, you don’t want one tax preparation business because of that.

00:15:58:16 – 00:16:26:05
Keith
If the feds move in, you’ve got other places, right? You got to diversify your crimes and you know, you want to blend in. You don’t want to have all your eggs in one basket. So because they’ve become these tax preparers, they can get all these products that Seth just talked to you, to you about previously with blank checks, the, you know, prepaid debit cards and all the great goodies that tax preparers are allowed to have.

00:16:26:08 – 00:16:55:05
Seth
So from the court documents, you learn that Gosha and his ladies, Mitchell and her children, Tasha and Keshia and others, they use these EFIN numbers, prepare and file electronically several false federal income tax returns and they anticipate sorry they directed those refunds to prepaid debit cards, but also to U.S. Treasury tracks and other banks that distributed the refunds via checks or prepaid debit cards.

00:16:55:05 – 00:17:13:13
Seth
Now, this is key as part of this conspiracy, these numbers, Keith, they’re going to blow you away. Well, you know, they’re going to blow our audience, the defendant and others would and did file over 7000 federal income tax returns from…

00:17:13:16 – 00:17:14:02
Keith
Told you it was big!

00:17:14:02 – 00:17:38:15
Seth
2010-2012 and it was a total refund number of over a $19 million in tax refunds. I’m going to repeat those numbers because it took me a minute to process that. 7000 income tax returns were filed in three years, and they claimed over $19 million. That is extraordinary.

00:17:38:18 – 00:18:01:02
Keith
It I can’t remember the exact numbers of the Michael Mann conspiracy that we talked about, but I believe this puts them in that realm of the Michael Mann Steiner story that we joke about all the time. And they’re doing it with a completely different type of criminal technology using tax refunds instead of loan to banks, which is just amazing.

00:18:01:02 – 00:18:09:00
Keith
So remember, we went back and said, why did you pick this case? Look at the size of the 7000. It’s just amazing.

00:18:09:02 – 00:18:11:08
Seth
Yeah.

00:18:11:11 – 00:18:36:22
Keith
So how do they file fraudulent tax returns? They use the same low tech technology that we’ve talked about in prior episodes, which is they go get stolen IDs and they go get them from the Alabama Department of Corrections because like we talked about in the last episode, inmates have their names, date of birth, Social Security numbers on all these checkin lists.

00:18:36:25 – 00:19:02:23
Keith
And that was actually one of the first ones that I found listed in the court documents was they said that Keshia Lanier receives stolen IDs on November 1st of 2010, and it came from the Department of Corrections. And I thought, well, I pick these cases independently. They didn’t really have anything to do with each other. This case today and prior case Episode 17 from last week.

00:19:02:26 – 00:19:36:07
Keith
But it was interesting that both cases, Department of Corrections was a source of stolen IDs and just the researcher in me wonders how many if this is actual a trend or if I just accidentally picked two cases that came out of Department of Corrections. But ends up being a very good source of data for them. So Gosha’s the one that gave Lanier this Department of Correction data because there’s this whole network of people working on this criminal conspiracy.

00:19:36:07 – 00:19:56:14
Keith
We talked about the sources of PII upfront with a bunch of people’s names. Basically, they gave it to Gosha and then Gosha being the head of the snake that Seth talked about earlier, then distribute it to Lanier. But I do want to note that it’s not like we’re talking about Lanier a lot in here. He did this with other people, too.

00:19:56:16 – 00:20:24:23
Keith
In the court documents, it says the same exact thing that we’re talking about with Lanier, he does with other coconspirators. They name some other ones, you know, Calvin Perry, Ernest James Simmons Jr, Pamela Ann Smith and so forth. Similar schemes. So even though we’re describing one to you imagine when you have 7000 returns that you have to file, you have to have a lot of these little I don’t even know how to categorize it.

00:20:24:23 – 00:20:31:23
Keith
So people working for you, bringing you these names in order to get up to 7000, in order to file them.

00:20:31:26 – 00:20:32:05
Seth
Yeah.

00:20:32:05 – 00:20:58:29
Seth
All right. So in November of 2010, you know, Kesha, Kesha Lanier obtained an even number, right? Electronically filed an identification ID Thank you. Excuse me. Then she went to town, Right? She’s prepared and filed several false 2020 for a 2010 prior tax year in April and May of 2011.

00:20:59:01 – 00:21:20:19
Seth
Tax return to 2010. And we learned that there were three alone. That total looks like almost, you know, $12,000, $3900, $4000, $4100. This is actually Keith, I remember in this case, the numbers were a little bit more diversified than in prior tax return schemes, where they were almost kind of eerily similar in terms of the numbers here.

00:21:20:21 – 00:22:34:17
Keith
And if you’re new here, you know that we talk about this in almost every episode. The government only charges a subset of what they probably could. And here, Seth talking about a few charges, but remember, we’re talking 7000 tax returns. That’s the end of the day. That’s the big picture here, 7000 tax returns. The government’s going to say, hey, these ten people were victims and then they convict them on those ten people. But there’s a lot more victims at stake here that I don’t want to gloss over. So then let’s see, this would be September 27th, 2011. Snell Quick obtains an EFIN as well. And then I was like, all right, well, what does she do with this? She gives it to Keshia Lanier. Hmm. All right, so then Keshia Lanier has you suspect at least two EFINs so, she has two ways to file fraudulent taxes. Well, October 5th of 2011 Keshia Lanier attains another EFIN because you need to diversify, you need to diversify your fraud across all your EFIN right? So you can’t just one EFIN.

00:22:34:20 – 00:23:02:02
Seth
Right. Well, think about it. I mean, if you have I mean, I guess you could have from the government’s perspective, if you’re looking for fraud, if you’re a tax return preparer, you’re probably going to have a single EFIN, right? You know, and then you could use that across multiple, multiple clients. But because this was a large set of conspirators and this is a much larger operation, they were frankly smart to have multiple EFINs here, I guess to throw the, you know, the feds off their track, so to speak.

00:23:02:04 – 00:23:33:12
Seth
That’s the only thing I could think of. You know, obviously, you don’t put all your eggs in one basket kind of thing. So we know flash forward a year to July of 2012, fraudulent filings occurred. Court documents state that Keshia Lanier sent an email to Snell quick listing account numbers and the personal information of a couple of people and that Snell quick then filed false 2011 federal income tax returns in the same name those people.

00:23:33:15 – 00:23:52:06
Keith
And she continues Snell Quick in it’d be August 12th of 2012 continued filing false returns. Let’s see they give an example of Z Lo claiming a refund in the amount of $919. And then what.

00:23:52:08 – 00:23:55:11
Seth
But directed to the tax refund to who?

00:23:55:13 – 00:24:00:27
Keith
To her own home address?

00:24:01:00 – 00:24:01:13
Seth
Yeah, that’s.

00:24:01:21 – 00:24:08:11
Keith
Right. So there is tax fraud going on and the criminal sent it to her home address. I did not make that up.

00:24:08:11 – 00:24:30:15
Seth
Which is weird because clearly they were sophisticated enough to set up EFINs and, you know, take a take, you know, a fee as a tax preparer would. Right? Wouldn’t they be smart to continue having I know. Send it to a debit card or something like that. Right. Where it’s a little bit harder to, you know, back into directly who the person was getting the money.

00:24:30:15 – 00:24:38:21
Seth
So, I don’t know. I just that that kind of was weird to me that they were slick in some parts of this crime, but very unslick in other parts.

00:24:38:24 – 00:25:05:00
Keith
Either they didn’t listen to the person that said don’t send it to your home address or they were doing something shady to try to make more money maybe from that the other people didn’t know about? I don’t know. Seems weird. But in September 1st of 2012, we have now we know of more stolen PII. And this one comes from the Alabama state databases and specifically it came from Tamika Floyd.

00:25:05:02 – 00:25:27:08
Keith
And if memory serves me, she worked at the Department of Health in Alabama. There are names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers. And this is all stuff you need to file tax returns. And what did she do with it? She took it right over, gave it to Gosha, who then distributed to Keshia Lanier and all the others in the conspiracy.

00:25:27:10 – 00:26:01:07
Seth
Right. That’s called conspiracy. Right. So the court documents talk about how in September 2012 and there’s multiple unknown, precise dates. Tracey Mitchell and Tasha Mitchell So that’s mother daughter and others obtained from individuals who had access to PII from a database maintained by an Alabama state agency. That’s the Department of Corrections. The means of identification of individuals, including the names, dates of birth and Social Security numbers.

00:26:01:10 – 00:26:28:02
Keith
And they continue. They continue. Tracey Mitchell then goes to her place of employment, which was Fort Benning, and started obtaining PII of military personnel and their families, because a lot of times these military, the people that are serving, will bring their family there and they will all use the same services. So it’s not just the military people, it’s their families too, that were victims.

00:26:28:04 – 00:26:29:04
Seth
Right. If you recall, these were.

00:26:29:09 – 00:26:29:23
Keith
Fort Benning.

00:26:29:23 – 00:26:35:04
Seth
Deployed to Afghanistan. So was I don’t know. I just found that to be really douchey.

00:26:35:07 – 00:26:38:25
Keith
Yeah, that that stung.

00:26:38:27 – 00:27:09:23
Seth
So more fraudulent filings on several dates. Also between September and December 2012 and January of 2013. Talarius Page, we mentioned that person earlier obtain PII through her employment with company A. So this is the call center and they’re here. There’s what, like six different names that are listed here all filed and again between September of 12 and looks like also December of 2012.

00:27:09:23 – 00:27:26:20
Seth
So it continued. Patrice Taylor also worked at that call center and also a she. So she had sent several false fraudulent tax returns. Also at the end of 2012.

00:27:26:22 – 00:27:31:13
Keith
Well, she found the PII through her employment and provided to Gosha.

00:27:31:15 – 00:27:41:03
Seth
Right. I apologize. Right. Tax returns to set process. First, get the PII, then send it over to Gosha who then filed with his with his crew. I apologize.

00:27:41:06 – 00:28:09:15
Keith
And so throughout November, Snell Quick and Lanier applied for these bank products because they are tax preparers like we discussed earlier. And they specifically wanted these checks, these blank checks that they could print for their tax preparation companies and time moves on in 2013, more EFINS are obtained by this whole group. More bank products are ordered.

00:28:09:17 – 00:28:33:20
Keith
And you’re wondering, why am I telling you this? Because I’m showing you how long this crime went on. We were talking about 2010 earlier. We’re already in 2013 and we’re talking about 7000 returns. And this is how it happened, is there’s many, many EFINs there’s many, many bank products. And I just made the note that at this point, there’s just way too many instances to go through each one.

00:28:33:20 – 00:28:47:06
Keith
So imagine that they have hundreds and hundreds of ways that they could cut checks to people and basically cut checks to fake people and reap the rewards from it.

00:28:47:08 – 00:29:10:11
Seth
Yeah, And just keep in mind, you know, if you’re wondering how did the government not see this, the returns here were de minimis. You know, I think the highest refund I’m seeing here was for $5900. Right? So the average refund here was significantly lower than that. It was 2000 2100 $1800. So as opposed to like a heavy hitter who has like, you know, a 20,000 or a $200,000 refund…

00:29:10:13 – 00:29:36:02
Seth
This is small potatoes to the government, right? This somebody, you know, that earns less than 30 grand a year, their taxes are going to be minimum. So I can see how the government it would take several years to figure out this fraudulent scheme. And it certainly wouldn’t be based upon the amount of the income here. So I understand the you know, the the idea behind this this crime, which is, you know, it’s you know, the government, you know, wouldn’t even realize these are such small numbers.

00:29:36:02 – 00:29:49:00
Seth
Who cares? Right? Because you can’t imagine that the the IRS does not have the resources. This is fairly well known to, you know, audit and check and recheck every single return.

00:29:49:02 – 00:30:18:28
Keith
And the court paperwork goes through what each person filed. You know, like Seth said, there’s a block of returns for Tracy Mitchell that were filed and they were all within the $2,000 front range for the refunds. Latasha Mitchell she files a bunch within like the $3,000 range. I looked at some from Keshia Lanier. She filed a bunch in the 1 to $3000 range.

00:30:18:28 – 00:30:45:28
Keith
So they’re all kind of in the same range. If you say it’s from 1 to $3000 and then it looks like they dipped down a little bit into the $1,000 range in 2013. And this is just the group of ladies filing just tons and tons and tons of returns and getting these, you know, each time 1000 to $3000.

00:30:46:01 – 00:31:13:06
Keith
Now, the kingpin himself, Gosha then also files some fraudulent tax returns. Gosha’s amounts are about the same. And they have a block of table. I’m not going to read through it. There’s like maybe ten here and they range anywhere from they started about 1000 bucks and then they go up to about the high $2,000. And so the government says doing their full investigation says, you know, it’s not that he just filed it.

00:31:13:07 – 00:31:33:09
Keith
He also got the cash and used the cash. So they said on or about March 24th of 2013, Gosha uses a prepaid debit card issued in the name of a victim that will just call K with the initials of K N and withdrew cash that was funded by that victim’s fraudulent tax refund.

00:31:33:16 – 00:31:43:03
Seth
That’s how we pay. That’s how he cashed out, right? He had it, you know, some dude’s name on a on a prepaid card. And it was he took the card.

00:31:43:05 – 00:32:03:07
Keith
Same day, went to his went to another ATM, pulled out some money, different person. So he has a different prepaid credit card. So even if he argued oops, somehow slipped and fell and landed in my wallet, now we know of at least two credit cards that he used on one day just to get funds out of an ATM.

00:32:03:09 – 00:32:26:23
Seth
Right. So let’s talk about evidence here. So the court documents discuss many text messages between all the conspirators throughout the crime. There’s really nothing interesting here then, other than coordinating how much tax refund checks are worth when they cash them and had a portion of the proceeds. And as Keith noted, there are over 30 conspirators here. We don’t have enough time to cover all of them.

00:32:26:26 – 00:32:47:29
Keith
But yeah, I was going to say, I read through a lot of text messages and it was, hey, such and such $1,000. Okay, Yeah. Pay it to this account. Hey, do you have such and such? Yeah. $3,000 paid to that account. Nothing juicy like we’ve had in our previous episodes, except for the fact that it’s the freaking evidence of them doing their crime over text messages.

00:32:47:29 – 00:32:59:11
Keith
Because why would you talk to somebody face to face where it wouldn’t be recorded? So here this was the mind blowing.

00:32:59:13 – 00:33:02:23
Seth
Plot to the next level. This is the next level stuff.

00:33:02:26 – 00:33:30:01
Keith
So as you can imagine, over the years, this whole group, they’re making a lot of money filing fraudulent tax returns and eventually somewhere somebody along the line says, we’re losing a fuck ton of money and I can’t figure it out. Why? Oh, it’s this blank check scheme somebody has got going on over here. Let’s shut that down and not allow this group of people to have a bunch of blank checks anymore.

00:33:30:04 – 00:33:42:23
Keith
So what do they do? What a good criminals do, Seth. They don’t just say, Oh, shit, you got us. All right, we’re done. And take their couple few million that they made and ride into the sunset they said, Hold my beer. I’ve got another one for you.

00:33:42:23 – 00:33:43:13
Seth
They double down.

00:33:43:14 – 00:34:56:00
Keith
They meet. They meet an individual named Elizabeth Grant. She is a United States postal employee in Seale, Alabama. So Elizabeth Grant, as you can imagine, has access to the info of the people on her postal route. Pretty sweet, right, for the criminal, because then they say, Hey, I need you, Ms.. Grant, to provide us with addresses on your route of real people’s names. We’re going to file fraudulent tax returns and have them mailed to those addresses, and we’re going to pay a little extra for you to pick up those checks when they arrive in the mail at this address. Will you do that for us? And she says, I’m in, you sweet bastard. Where do I sign? So that yeah, that just absolutely blew my mind that they bribed a postal employee, got them involved, and they were intricately involved in this criminal conspiracy. And now they’re snagging checks that are going through the freaking mail to people that don’t even know that they’re having checks mailed to their house. They don’t even see this.

00:34:56:02 – 00:35:28:07
Seth
All right. So we also learned that there were more United States Postal Service workers were involved. We know that June 2013 Postal Service, let’s call her a postal service worker who lives with Grant. We just mentioned her. She provided to mom, Tracy Mitchell and others federal tax refund checks. But she person A also provided to Gosha and Tasha Mitchell and others federal tax refund checks so it wasn’t just that she committed the crime.

00:35:28:10 – 00:35:40:26
Seth
This is Grant Elizabeth grant postal service. She actually recruited other people. It looks like that other person rolled because they are not disclosing her name, meaning rolled, meaning she probably turned state’s evidence.

00:35:40:29 – 00:35:58:05
Keith
Okay. I want to stop for a second because Seth and I can see the slide and you guys can’t. But all of the conspirators that we’ve talked about so far, I want to I’m going to name them out loud to you right now. We’re just going to name them. We got Tracy Mitchell, We got Latasha Mitchell. We got the Dameisha Mitchell.

00:35:58:05 – 00:36:04:24
Keith
Remember, that’s mother, two daughters. We now I don’t remember if we actually talked about her with Tami.

00:36:04:27 – 00:36:05:11
Seth
To make.

00:36:05:12 – 00:36:06:14
Keith
Tamaica Hoskins.

00:36:06:21 – 00:36:08:24
Seth
That’s a Tamaica unless you misspelled.

00:36:08:24 – 00:36:14:00
Keith
Tamaica Hoskins, Sharonda Johnson, Cynthia Johnson.

00:36:14:06 – 00:36:15:05
Seth
Also mother daughter.

00:36:15:05 – 00:36:40:09
Keith
There’s right, there’s Keshia Lanier, there’s Maquetta Snell-Quick, Talarius Page and Patrice Taylor. Every goddamn name on that list is female, Seth. Yes, it is. Mind blowing. It is also the day on May 1st of 2014 that all of them were indicted for this scheme that we’ve been talking about.

00:36:40:09 – 00:36:41:26
Seth
Yes, that’s crazy.

00:36:41:26 – 00:36:53:08
Keith
So typically these crimes are very male dominated, typically younger, male dominated. And I just went through that list and it was just all females and it was just amazing. So there you go.

00:36:53:11 – 00:37:03:24
Seth
Yeah. Yeah. May 1st, not a good day. So let’s see here for Tracy Mitchell and her daughters. No, just one daughter.

00:37:03:26 – 00:37:05:28
Keith
All all the conspirators.

00:37:06:00 – 00:37:07:22
Seth
This is all the conspirators.

00:37:07:24 – 00:37:08:29
Keith
Yep.

00:37:09:01 – 00:37:35:22
Seth
Okay. So basically in the indictment, it talks about how they used PII to prepare and file electronically false income tax returns and directed the refunds of those to prepaid debit cards, treasury checks. That’s the blank checks and financial institutions, which in turn issued the refund checks via prepaid debit cards. So the defendants would and did file over 7000 of these.

00:37:35:22 – 00:37:56:13
Seth
This is from 2011 and 12. So the other indictment had another year here. And here the number goes up a little bit more to 20 million. I’m not sure why the discrepancy? But it was between 19 and $20 million. Pick your number in false refunds. It’s really an astonishing crime. What’s most counts? I’m sorry I didn’t go through the counts.

00:37:56:13 – 00:37:59:01
Seth
Right. Keith, Want to take us through the counts?

00:37:59:03 – 00:38:51:15
Keith
There’s a hundred and fucking 16 counts on them, and I trust I’m going to categorize them. So don’t worry. We’re not going through all of them. Count one is the big one. They usually put the big ones up front. Conspiracy to defraud the United States. Yes, clearly. Then we have counts two through 33, which are wire fraud. So imagine something transmitted on the Internet. It’s reason why we’re having an eCrimeBytes episode here. There’s text messages that would count for wire fraud counts 34 through 57 is mail fraud because they bribed postal employees and did all that crazy stuff. So not only have wire fraud, but they have mail fraud to deal with counts 58 through 113 is aggravated I.D. theft, which I imagine is probably a tough charge to face.

00:38:51:17 – 00:39:15:00
Keith
And then you have counts 114 through 116, which is possession of unauthorized access devices, which typically means something like an ATM card or something like that in somebody else’s name. So that’s it. Hundred and 16 counts. So if you’re one of those females that we just listed prior, you’re probably shitting a brick at looking at 116 counts. Right.

00:39:15:00 – 00:39:40:26
Seth
So March 5th, 2015, we have our first guilty plea here by Keshia Lanier. So they charged her with a bunch of stuff. She pled guilty only to two counts, one of wire fraud and one of aggravated identity theft. But that’s not the end of her story. There were apparently some competency hearings for Lanier, which is interesting because I would say anybody who’s involved in this fraud scheme was clearly competent before she was sentenced.

00:39:40:26 – 00:39:51:10
Seth
And apparently she ran and her bond was revoked. I’m pretty sure she was eventually captured and is currently doing time. But I don’t I don’t know if we have the details on that.

00:39:51:13 – 00:40:08:06
Keith
It all kind of happened at the same time in the court document timeline that I was looking at. It was just really interesting. There you go. She tried to run. They caught her and there was a competency hearing. And at the end of the day, the best I could tell and I’m not a I’m a scientist, not a lawyer.

00:40:08:06 – 00:40:35:08
Keith
And what I took out of it was that they questioned her competency probably to cover their ass later on for appeal. And it came down to basically her later on just saying, don’t worry about it. I’m going to waive my right to saying anything for competency. So as the end of the day, as the court is assuming she is competent and she’s standing and for all these charges and she pled guilty to these two.

00:40:35:08 – 00:40:55:26
Keith
So then there was a huge day. Remember all those names I gave you? And I said, they’re all indicted on the same day. There was a huge day. It was August 18th, 2015. And you imagine some prosecutor probably went out and celebrated big time that night because we have all those ladies names that we talked about earlier. They pled guilty.

00:40:55:26 – 00:41:05:16
Keith
So we have Cynthia Johnson. She pled guilty to one count conspiracy. She got two years probation and just over $5,000 restitution.

00:41:05:16 – 00:41:16:00
Keith
Demeshia Mitchell, she pled guilty to count one and count 102, which is aggravated identity theft. If you hear me say count one, that’s the conspiracy. That was the big one.

00:41:16:02 – 00:41:30:06
Seth
Yeah, that is the big one, too. You’ll see a big difference between who we just heard Cynthia Johnson and Demi Schmidt. So remember, she’s the daughter who clearly wasn’t just a patsy here. So, Keith, what did she get? Because I thought, this is interesting.

00:41:30:09 – 00:41:44:13
Keith
So count 102, just to remind you, was aggravated identity theft. So that’s the addition here. Compared to Cynthia Johnson. She got 65 months, three years supervised release. And just under a half a million dollars in restitution.

00:41:44:15 – 00:41:56:04
Seth
So that’s almost six years. Well, five and a half years she got. And half a million dollars and well, 440,000. I don’t want to round down what are her sister get.

00:41:56:06 – 00:42:04:01
Keith
Latasha Mitchell counts one and 79 is what she pled guilty to the 79 being aggravated identity theft.

00:42:04:03 – 00:42:08:18
Seth
She’s count one being defrauding the United States, right. Yep.

00:42:08:21 – 00:42:17:15
Keith
And she got 36 months, two years supervised release and just over a half million. That’s 513,000 in restitution.

00:42:17:17 – 00:42:30:13
Seth
Yeah. So she got quite a bit. She got 30 months less than her sister, but actually ended up owing about $75,000 more in restitution. I’m not sure which one is better. That’s interesting.

00:42:30:16 – 00:42:40:27
Keith
Talarius Page, that was the lady at the call center, counts one and 67, aggravated identity theft was the second one. Sixty months. So that’s five years.

00:42:40:27 – 00:42:48:09
Keith
Three years supervised release a restitution of $762,000.

00:42:48:11 – 00:42:52:21
Seth
Sharonda Just a bit more. Half mine. Yeah, it’s a lot.

00:42:52:23 – 00:43:05:05
Keith
Sharonda Johnson was an next one. Count one. She got 24 months, two years, supervised release, so 24 months in prison and then two years supervised release. And her restitution was…

00:43:05:27 – 00:43:30:04
Seth
440,000. And it was the exact same the exact same amount of money to the dollar as Meisha Mitchell. I found that interesting. I’m not sure why, because Meisha Mitchell, they both pled to. No. So Sharonda only pled to count one, which is the big one, right to defraud the United States. Meisha did count one, but also another count for ID theft.

00:43:30:07 – 00:43:41:25
Seth
So I’m interesting. I mean, she got quite a bit more prison time, but they had exact same amount of restitution. It’s an interesting analysis.

00:43:41:28 – 00:44:06:08
Keith
And then we have let’s see, I just did Sharonda Johnson Right. So we have Mequetta Snell-Quick. She got count one and 72 for her plea, which was another aggravated I.D. theft. She got 24 months and one day, two years supervised release and restitution of $199,000. Tracy Mitchell, that’s the mother, right?

00:44:06:09 – 00:44:08:00
Seth
That’s the mom. That’s the mom.

00:44:08:00 – 00:44:23:28
Keith
Okay. So Tracy Mitchell the mom counts one, two and 58. So that was the defrauding the United States, the wire fraud and the aggravated I.D. theft. Hold on. She got 159 months.

00:44:23:29 – 00:44:30:29
Seth
That’s a hammer. That’s 13 years ish. That’s a hammer.

00:44:31:01 – 00:44:43:12
Keith
Yeah. She gets three years supervised release after that. And her restitution is $1 million. And let’s see, about 51k on top of that. So yeah, 1000000 to $51.

00:44:43:15 – 00:45:05:27
Seth
Yeah, that’s a hammer. But that’s not the worst of the sentencing. We’ll get to that. And then we had one more Patrice Taylor pled guilty to count one that’s defrauding the United States. She got a year and a day plus two years supervised release. Her for her restitution was fairly nominal of $28,783. So interesting that some things were exactly the same.

00:45:05:27 – 00:45:34:01
Seth
It was a little bit all over the place, but that’s not the good one. Let’s talk about the big fish. This too big fish, there’s Keshia Lanier and we’ll get to Gosha, in a minute. I’ll take Keshia Lanier. October of 2015. Keshia is sentenced, so it looks like she did not cop a plea. So she gets 180 months and that’s 156 for count 18 and 24 months to count 74.

00:45:34:02 – 00:46:02:22
Seth
They’re served consecutively, not concurrently. That is 15 years. There’s an additional three years of supervised release and and restitution of wait for it, $5.8 million she’s got to pay back. And Keith, you know, I always wonder in a prior case, as we saw, where we definitely know that money was kind of captured, you know, out of these criminals bank accounts.

00:46:02:24 – 00:46:16:06
Seth
And then separate from that, they had to pay the restitution. We don’t know if they pocketed the money and ended up sitting them in some kind of Cayman Islands or Swiss account where they were paying them back through that or not. I don’t know the answer to that.

00:46:16:08 – 00:46:29:22
Keith
I don’t recall from the paperwork. And I will remind you, we said that she didn’t cop a plea, Keshia Lanier actually did. She did. That was her plea agreement. Yeah. This is her plea.

00:46:29:24 – 00:46:50:24
Seth
So that’s scary to me. I mean, so what that means then is either they had the goods on her compared to her coconspirators so bad that she pled to 15 years. That means they were looking at probably 50, 60, 70 years combined. I mean, why would somebody plea to something that extensive when the coconspirators got so much less?

00:46:50:26 – 00:46:58:23
Seth
That just means they must have really had the goods on her or she was really a ringleader. But wait, it gets worse.

00:46:58:25 – 00:47:28:06
Keith
Well, we do have another player to talk about, Elizabeth Grant from the postal service in February of 2016. She pleads guilty as well. And I was like, I want to know more about this Postal Service one. And I went into her case online in the federal system and tried to pull her indictment and it was fucking sealed. So I couldn’t actually tell you much about her case at all, other than I found the information that she pled guilty to let’s see would be three counts.

00:47:28:06 – 00:47:44:03
Keith
One is conspiracy to file false claims. The second one is aggravated identity theft, and the third one is embezzlement of mail, which when you’re a postal worker, embezzlement of mail is like that’s like what you do.

00:47:44:05 – 00:48:15:19
Seth
Yeah, It’s not good. It’s not good. So she gets her seven zero months, seventy months. So that’s what, a little less than six years. The term consists of 46 months for count one and 30 to be served concurrently and another 24 months on the mail fraud. And there is consecutive she gets three years of supervised release and she’s got to pay back almost $1,000,000, $978,000.

00:48:15:19 – 00:48:35:00
Seth
She had to pay back. And that’s you know, we were wondering how much money did she make? We’ve had that conversation and many other of these calls where if you’re like a coconspirator and you’re kind of the, you know, the linchpin to make the fraud happen, you want, well, these get paid. I am willing to bet you, Keith, she didn’t make anywhere near the million dollars she owes back.

00:48:35:00 – 00:48:37:20
Seth
But that’s conjecture.

00:48:37:23 – 00:48:56:03
Keith
No, I didn’t see it. I but I, I didn’t get the impression that anybody, anybody in this particular group got a huge payout. It sounds like it was so many people that the payouts weren’t gigantic for each person like we’ve talked about in prior episodes.

00:48:56:05 – 00:48:58:18
Seth
Yeah.

00:48:58:20 – 00:49:26:00
Keith
So now we got the big dog, we got Gosha on June 28th of 2017, he’s indicted on 35 counts. The count one is conspiracy to defraud the government, similar to what we saw with conspirators. Counts two through 25 is mail fraud. And this is the IRS sending the prepaid debit cards or checks through the mail. That’s each one is is is its own count.

00:49:26:03 – 00:49:58:03
Keith
We have wire fraud for counts, 26 through 28. And that’s because of electronic tax filing. And you go, why is there only two counts for wire fraud? Well, like I said earlier, they only have to charge a couple and they can hold on to a bunch of other victims in case they need to charge them later on and then counts 29 through 35 is aggravated ID theft and Gosha decides to roll the dice in November 2017 and decides to go to trial.

00:49:58:03 – 00:50:22:26
Keith
And he’s found guilty on counts one four through 25, 26 to 28, 31 to 55. And you’re wondering what does that mean and what he was charged. Okay. He’s charged on or he was found guilty on everything except for four counts. There were two mail fraud counts that he was found not guilty on, and he was found not guilty and two of the aggravated ID theft.

00:50:22:26 – 00:50:28:20
Keith
So basically he was found guilty on almost everything, is what I’m trying to say here.

00:50:28:20 – 00:50:38:04
Seth
Right. But don’t let the lack of counts that he was guilty on dissuade your thinking he didn’t get the hammer dropped on him. He did.

00:50:38:04 – 00:51:12:27
Seth
So in March of 2018 Gosha got his sentencing. 360 months that is 30 years that’s 120 months on count one. That’s 216 months on counts four through 25 and yeah, another no, that’s not to add another 216 months. But those were concurrent. And then another 24 months on counts 31-55. Those are consecutive. So a total of 360 months plus a three year supervised release period.

00:51:12:27 – 00:51:49:23
Seth
The special conditions of his release, substance abuse, probation officer, substance abuse, not he supposedly abuse substances, substance abuse, probably like a program, rather. Any financial information has to go directly to probation officer. Have you ever be able to work again, they have to kind of vet it, make sure it’s legit, cannot obtain new credit without approval of court unless in compliance with the payment schedule, you must participate in a mental health treatment program and submit to a search of his person, residence, office or vehicle pursuant to the search policy, which basically means they can search him any time they want.

00:51:49:23 – 00:51:50:22
Keith
Yeah.

00:51:50:24 – 00:51:52:28
Seth
This is a rough sentence.

00:51:53:01 – 00:52:03:18
Keith
I also realize I did not make a slide on his restitution amount. So while you were talking, Seth, I pulled up his judgment document to see if I could tell you on the fly what it is.

00:52:03:18 – 00:52:15:28
Keith
Oh, here we go. Criminal monetary penalties. Oh, You ready for this? I’m ready. All right. He is on the hook for $9 million.

00:52:16:04 – 00:52:18:11
Seth
Oh, my goodness. Yeah.

00:52:18:11 – 00:52:23:23
Keith
So essentially, you can add 52 K on that to you, but it’s basically $9 million.

00:52:23:23 – 00:52:38:24
Seth
So essentially, he got 30 years and owes $9 million to the government. That is by far, I think, the worst sentence we’ve seen on all of our eCrimeBytes episodes in terms of total amount paid back and time spent, time served.

00:52:38:24 – 00:53:05:15
Keith
Yep. All right. So we are now at the end. I hope you enjoyed that. We tried to be as concise as we could for such a hodgepodge of a conspiracy of so many people. And that’s my very first conclusion here, which is this is a huge operation you’re talking about 30 plus conspirators. And we gave you, what would you say, seven, maybe ten conspirators, maybe a third of them?

00:53:05:18 – 00:53:31:21
Keith
Yes. So we’re only giving you a little snippet of this whole operation. And you saw the shenanigans that went on. We talked about 7000 plus false tax returns, which, oh, my God, I don’t even how you would do that. The operation. You’d have a warehouse of people filling stuff out I’d imagine for $20 million in return. So it was not chump change that they were doing this for.

00:53:31:21 – 00:53:47:26
Seth
No, and then we learned that these stolen identity tax return schemes are numerous these SIRFs, and apparently it seems to be a fairly low technical bar of entry into this electronic crime compared to SIM swapping and other kinds of things that we’ve seen.

00:53:47:28 – 00:54:09:07
Keith
Yeah, because, you know, this actually leads into my next point, which is PII can be stolen from pretty much anywhere. We looked at hospitals, state databases, call centers and so forth. And if you go back to what Seth was saying with a low bar of entry compared to SIM swapping, you need to go to somebody that has access to PII that’s willing to sell it to you.

00:54:09:07 – 00:54:39:13
Keith
That’s pretty much the bar of entry. Then, depending on how much of a criminal genius you want to be, you’re either going to set up fake, you know, like these fake addresses to send these checks and credit cards to or you’ll be like a criminal in this case, and you might just send it to yourself. And, you know, still pretty low bar of entry, right? You only need a mailing spot and PII in order to pull this whole thing off.

00:54:39:15 – 00:54:59:20
Seth
Yeah, for sure. We saw that. Gosha’s, sentence at 30 years is one of the stiffest we’ve seen as well as Lanier at 15. And you know, Keith is postulating maybe that was there a plea offer for Gosha? You know, that would have been a quite a bit less than what it was. But it sounds like they wanted to throw the book at somebody.

00:54:59:23 – 00:55:20:19
Seth
And if they got the fact that he didn’t plead guilty immediately, they were happy to probably do that with him, especially since he was ahead of the snake. And I’ll take the last one that postal employees participating here was not only surprising, but frankly, next level shit. And you know, I have some friends whose family members are in the postal office or postal department.

00:55:20:19 – 00:55:27:00
Seth
And, you know, it’s a very noble job. So it’s disappointing to see somebody would sell out their country for a few bucks.

00:55:27:00 – 00:55:50:02
Keith
Yup. And with that, how do you get a hold of us? You can go to our website. It’s eCrimeBytes and I’m going to spell it for you. It’s E C R I M E B Y as in yellow milk T S dot com. And if you wonder why I’m saying, Y is it yellow milk? You need to go back and listen to the rural kingpin of Michigan episode and it’s all explained in there.

00:55:50:02 – 00:55:53:15
Keith
It’s a running joke. We’re going to, we’re going to probably use it until we die.

00:55:53:17 – 00:55:55:21
Seth
We’re going to run it out. Yeah, it’s not going anywhere.

00:55:55:21 – 00:56:16:25
Keith
So when you go to that website, there’s if you’re on your phone, there’s like this little hamburger looking three lines up in the upper right. If you click on that, you’re going to see all our social media and our YouTube channel and all that kind of stuff. Have fun, click in there. You can reach us on pretty much any platform and we do love hearing from you.

00:56:16:28 – 00:56:38:17
Keith
If you’re wondering what you can do for us, please leave us a favorable podcast app review somewhere that lets other people know that you know we have a podcast worth listening to and that pushes us up the search results when people are searching for true crime podcasts. And if you haven’t already, please do subscribe on your favorite podcasting app.

00:56:38:17 – 00:57:01:28
Keith
We don’t care what it is. We all use different ones. I use Spotify, there’s iTunes, whatever it is you listen on, subscribe there. So that way every week, you know, when we release a new episode like this and I’m going to give you a little bit of a preview into next week, which is it’s a couple that cyberstalks his ex-wife.

00:57:02:00 – 00:57:34:05
Keith
I’m going to go out on a limb and say at least equal to Dr. Shitbag, Ronald Ilg that we talked about, and I forget which episode it is, but it was one of our prior episodes where he cyber stalked and stalked his ex-wife mercilessly. Well, I found another couple that is comparable, and it is so crazy that you have I just I have to have an episode for the guy in there and then I have to have an episode for when they get together because it ratchets up.

00:57:34:08 – 00:57:51:04
Keith
And that’s how we’re going to try to end our season one for eCrimeBytes and don’t think, Oh, they’re going to stop producing. Nope, nope. It’s just in numbers. We’re we’re ending season one just in the half a year mark and then we’re going to start season two for the second half of 2023. So there’s nothing to worry about.

00:57:51:04 – 00:58:02:17
Keith
We’re just doing it to flip numbers and to just kind of have it be nice and tidy with how it’s listed in the podcasting apps and that’s all I have. Do you have anything else to add Seth?

00:58:02:19 – 00:58:18:12
Seth
No, no, it was this was a good one. I as a former tax guy, I appreciate this one. I agree that the next one, which is a two parter, is batshit crazy. So everyone buckle your seatbelts. But we’ve enjoyed the ride and we’ll look forward to finishing strong.

00:58:18:14 – 00:58:49:29
Keith
Yeah, we’ve learned. We have learned a lot. We’ve had sound issues, we’ve had editing issues. So season one’s been a lot of Seth and I trying to figure out how to do this, and now I think we’ve kind of figured that part out and we can just pretty much do content and releasing from this point forward. So that’s why, you know, kind of get season one behind us and we’ll start fresh in season two with all our new tools, editing tricks and music scores and all sorts of new stuff that I have in store for you guys that you don’t even know about yet.

00:58:50:01 – 00:58:57:18
Keith
So with that, we enjoyed having you on this episode and we look forward to seeing you on our next episode number 19. Alrighty, thanks. Bye.

00:58:57:21 – 00:58:58:23
Seth
Thanks so much.