New York man pleads guilty to bank fraud and identity theft in connection with stolen $810,000 tax refund check

Date: July 25, 2025

Contact: newsroom@ci.irs.gov

BOSTON — A Yonkers, N.Y. man pleaded guilty yesterday in federal court in Boston in connection with a scheme to steal an $810,000 tax refund by impersonating a corporate executive in Connecticut.

Steven Ware pleaded guilty to one count of bank fraud and two counts of aggravated identity theft. U.S. Senior District Court Judge William G. Young scheduled sentencing for Oct. 8, 2025. Ware was arrested and charged by criminal complaint in September 2024 and subsequently indicted by a federal grand jury in October 2024.

In December 2023, Ware opened bank accounts in the name of a Connecticut investment company and one of its executives at a credit union in Tyngsborough, Mass. When opening the account, Ware identified himself as the executive – using the executive’s full name, date of birth, Social Security number and other documents.

Shortly after opening the account, Ware returned to the credit union pretending to be the executive and deposited a United States Treasury check payable to the company and the executive for $810,337.

Once the check cleared, a debit card was used to withdraw money from the account to buy goods at various retailers in New York, New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Ware returned to the Tyngsborough credit union several times over the following days and weeks pretending to be the executive and wired more than $634,000 of the stolen funds.

The charge of bank fraud provides for a sentence of up to 30 years in prison, five years of supervised release and a fine of up to $1 million. The charges of aggravated identity theft each provide for a mandatory two years in prison, in addition to any sentence imposed for bank fraud, one year of supervised release and a fine of up to $250,000. Sentences are imposed by a federal district court judge based upon the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and statutes which govern the determination of a sentence in a criminal case.

United States Attorney Leah B. Foley; Thomas Demeo, Acting Special Agent in Charge of the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation, Boston Field Office; Ted E. Docks, Special Agent in Charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Boston Division; Ketty Larco-Ward, Inspector in Charge of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service’s Boston Division; and Michael Carpenter, Special Agent in Charge of the U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, OIG made the announcement today. Valuable assistance was provided by the Tyngsborough Police Department. Assistant U.S. Attorney Kriss Basil of the Securities, Financial & Cyber Fraud Unit is prosecuting the case.

IRS Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) is the law enforcement arm of the IRS, responsible for conducting financial crime investigations, including tax fraud, narcotics trafficking, money laundering, public corruption, healthcare fraud, identity theft and more. IRS-CI special agents are the only federal law enforcement agents with investigative jurisdiction over violations of the Internal Revenue Code, obtaining a 90% federal conviction rate. The agency has 19 field offices located across the U.S. and 14 attaché posts abroad.