JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — An Orange Park woman was sentenced to two years in prison for a scheme to file false tax returns and two years in prison for an unrelated online romance scam, which will run concurrently.
According to the Department of Justice, Iona Coates owned and operated Bits & Bytes Accounting Services Inc., which provided tax preparation and bookkeeping services, according to the Department of Justice.
Between 2015 and 2020, Coates claimed $228,788 in tax refunds on her individual federal income tax returns by falsely reporting that taxes had been withheld from her income and had been paid to the IRS. Coates also created nearly 20 sham entities to file false tax returns that claimed fuel tax credits. Between 2017-2019, Coates prepared and filed 35 returns, the release said.
In 2020, Coates met two individuals online through a dating website and provided them with her bank account information and began receiving money into her account from victims of the scheme. In December 2020, U.S. Secret Service agents met with Coates and told her she was acting as a “money mule” in an online romance scheme.
The two people were acting as fake suitors on dating websites and convinced victims to send money to Coates’s bank account. The Secret Service advised Coates to stop the scheme, but she began acting as a money mule for another online romance scammer. Between December 2020 and September 2021, Coates received $229,376 into her bank accounts from victims of the scheme and sent the money to the scammer.
Coates pleaded guilty in July.
U.S. District Judge Brian Davis ordered Coates to serve a total of three years of supervised release for both schemes, to pay approximately $186,288 in restitution to the government and $229,376 in restitution to the victims of the romance scheme, the release said.
IRS Criminal Investigation investigated the tax scheme and the U.S. Secret Service investigated the online romance scheme.
