Wilkins Estrella and Charlene Marte pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bank fraud in connection with using social security numbers and other personally identifiable information belonging to hundreds of victims to open debit cards and attempt to fraudulently obtain $1.6 million in pandemic relief funds from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the New York State Department of Labor. The scheme resulted in almost $1 million in actual losses. Estrella, a former clerk at a Bronx hospital, is also charged with the wrongful disclosure of individually identifiable health information for accessing and stealing the data of at least 4,005 hospital patients for use in the fraud scheme.
From at least 2020 to 2022, Estrella and his romantic partner, Marte, misused the names, social security numbers, and other personally identifiable information belonging to hundreds of individuals to fraudulently obtain almost $1 million in COVID-19 stimulus checks and tax refunds from the IRS and unemployment insurance benefits from the New York State Department of Labor. Estrella and Marte also arranged for these and other funds to be loaded onto hundreds of debit cards that they opened in other people’s names using stolen data, and had the cards mailed to their homes and to the homes of their family members. Estrella and Marte obtained this data from multiple sources, including a hospital in the Bronx where Estrella worked as a business clerk for almost a decade. In 2020, Estrella was terminated from that role after an internal systems audit revealed that he had improperly accessed the protected health information of at least 4,005 hospital patients.