The federal government has filed court documents asking a judge to allow them to keep nearly $400,000 seized from a Tampa business. While no one has been arrested in the case, the government has filed its request in Civil Court.<\/p>\n
The business, known as M. Gold and Diamonds, is located at the University Square Mall. The kiosk is owned by\u00a0Aneel Mohammad.<\/strong><\/p>\n Government officials allege that beginning in September 2011, the business began accepting business from new customers. Those customers were allegedly making purchases using debit cards with money fraudulently obtained from identity theft and federal income tax fraud.<\/p>\n The Secret Service cited in court documents that Mohammad<\/strong> was aware of where the money on the debit cards was generated.<\/p>\n The Secret Service affidavit said that in August of 2011, the business conducted less than $17,000 on debit cards. However, the following month, the business generated $374,000 from debit cards.<\/p>\n The federal government launched a multi-agency investigation into income tax fraud in September 2010, after more than $25 million were loaded on to pre-paid debit cards. In the Tampa area, hundreds of millions of dollars in tax refunds have been paid on false refund claims.<\/p>\n In September 2011, First Data, the company that process debit card payments contacted M. Gold and Diamonds after the sharp increase in purchases made on prepaid debit cards. The company discovered that 352 card transactions had taken place between September and October 2011.<\/p>\n Of those transactions, 294 appeared especially suspicious \u201cbecause they were for whole dollar amounts and were executed with cards whose controlling companies primarily issued pre-paid debit cards for electronic tax refunds,\u201d court documents stated.<\/p>\n The company contacted Mohammad<\/strong> and was reportedly told he was accepting debit cards as down payments on jewelry. The company asked for documentation and invoices for the purchases.<\/p>\n However, after he failed to provide the requested information, his account was closed and the contents of the account, $379,797,57, was placed in a reserve account.<\/p>\n The court documents stated that when Mohammad <\/strong>was interviewed by law enforcement, he admitted that he was aware of the tax fraud and stopped accepting the debit cards. However, after his business declined, he began accepting them again, the court documents stated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The federal government has filed court documents asking a judge to allow them to keep nearly $400,000 seized from a Tampa business. While no one has been arrested in the case, the government has filed its request in Civil Court. The business, known as M. Gold and Diamonds, is located at the University Square Mall. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":210,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/210"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21984"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21984\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}