SAN DIEGO Jason Ellis of Poway pleaded guilty in federal court today to filing a false tax return as part of a years long tax-evasion scheme with former Chabad of Poway Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein.
Until around 2018, Rabbi Goldstein was the director and head rabbi at Chabad of Poway, a tax-exempt religious organization. Goldstein also operated several non-profit entities affiliated with the Chabad, including the Friendship Circle of San Diego. Beginning in 2008, at Rabbi Goldstein s request, Ellis, who was at the time an employee of Qualcomm, made a $1,000 donation to Friendship Circle. Ellis then requested that Qualcomm match that donation through the company s corporate matching program. Unbeknownst to Qualcomm, Goldstein met with Ellis in person and returned the entirety of his $1,000 to him in cash, and kept the falsely matched Qualcomm donation. Ellis repeated this scheme in the same way every year through 2017.
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Anyone’s stash will do.
White-collar criminals come in all sizes and styles, but they share a motive: to steal money. Anyone’s stash will do. According to the FBI, they are experts at “deceit, concealment, [and] violation of trust.” Of the lot, the most complex to prosecute and the likeliest to weasel a light or “deferred” sentence are the fraudsters whose open secret is to appear legitimate: the neighborly crook, the good egg from church. Money launderers, work-site embezzlers, pyramid scammers, phony security traders nice folk like Gina Champion-Cain. The latest basket term for crimes perpetrated on the near and maybe dear is “affinity fraud,” tricking those the swindler knows, often intimately.