Woburn Newspaper Deliveryman Indicted on Fraud Charges

A Reading man who worked as a newspaper deliveryman in Woburn has been indicted and arraigned on charges of identity fraud, forgery, larceny totaling more than $200,000 and numerous other charges, Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryan and Woburn Police Chief Robert Ferullo informed the public this week.

The suspect, Ikponmwosa Ogiugo, 22, of Reading, was arraigned in Middlesex Superior Court in Woburn on 23 counts relating to a complex larceny scheme, including charges of felony larceny, larceny on persons sixty years of age or older, forging and uttering counterfeit checks, filing fraudulent tax returns, money laundering, identity fraud, and being a common and notorious thief.

Woburn Patch reported many instances of the tax fraud in the police logs, including this post. 

According to the release, Middlesex Superior Court Clerk Magistrate Michael Sullivan ordered the defendant held on $25,000 cash bail. Conditions of the bail include, GPS monitoring and home confinement, with release for some daylight hours in order to secure and maintain employment.  A bail review was heard by Middlesex Superior Court Judge Kenneth Desmond who again ordered the bail at the same amount.

Ogiugo's next court date is August 2 for a pretrial conference.

 “These are troubling allegations where the defendant would take advantage of long-time customers, many of them elderly, by using their personal banking information to create his own accounts to access their money,” District Attorney Ryan said.  “We allege that it is because these victims did everything right, and monitored their accounts, that the defendant’s activities were ultimately discovered.”

According to the report, authorities began an investigation in December 2012 after receiving complaints from some of the defendant’s customers in Woburn who noticed that unauthorized checks were being passed through their bank accounts.  That investigation allegedly unveiled a complex forgery and larceny scheme wherein the defendant, who was employed during 2012 doing newspaper home delivery to residential customers in Woburn, would garner personal and bank account information from those customers which he then used to create counterfeit checks drawn on their bank accounts, totaling more than $240,000.

As a result of the investigation authorities learned that the defendant encouraged and received gratuities from subscribers for delivering their newspapers, especially during the holiday season.  The defendant then allegedly incorporated the bank routing information and the individual bank account numbers into new computer-generated blank checks.  

With the personal information he garnered from the tip checks, he would also search on-line for additional information to assist in his identity theft, including social security numbers and  mothers’ maiden names, often use to establish fraudulent accounts.

Allegedly, the defendant would send the counterfeit checks to individuals residing outside of Massachusetts, where they would be deposited in accounts in New Jersey, New York, Florida, Alabama and Washington State.  It is believed that some of the payees of the counterfeit checks were duped into believing the checks were legitimate and, at the defendant’s urging, deposited them in their own personal bank account and then forwarded the proceeds via Western Union to recipients, designated by the defendant, residing in India. 

In some instances once customers realized that unauthorized checks were being made on their accounts, they would close them. However, because they were unaware of the defendant’s alleged involvement at that time, they would then issue a substitute gratuity check to the defendant since the old account had been closed, the release explained. In this way, the defendant was in a position to create, and did create, more and more new counterfeit checks off the newly established account. 

According to the district attoeny, the defendant also allegedly used that personal information to file false tax returns in the names of his Woburn newspaper route subscribers with the Massachusetts Department of Revenue and the IRS in 2012.  On those returns, the defendant would indicate that the applicant was entitled to state and federal refunds as they had pre-paid a disproportionate amount of tax withholding relative to their actual income earned that year. 

The case was investigated by the Woburn Police Department with the assistance of the U.S. Secret Service, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, the IRS and the Massachusetts Department of Revenue.

"These charges are allegations, and the defendant is presumed innocent until proven guilty," the release states. 

 The prosecutor assigned to handle this case is Assistant District Attorney Doug Cannon.  The Victim Witness Advocate is Danielle DeMeo.  The Digital Evidence Investigator is Melissa Marino.  The Lead investigator is Woburn Detective Brian McManus.