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Two former bank employees were sentenced in Boston federal court last week for separate schemes involving their roles at the banks.
Gina Rogers, 46, of Tewksbury, was sentenced last week to three years of supervised release, including three months of home detention, for stealing more than $64,000 while working as a bank teller for Citizens Bank, according to a statement from the U.S. attorney’s office. Rogers had pleaded guilty in August to one count of bank theft.
While working as a teller and vault custodian at Citizens’ Woburn branch, Rogers stole $64,496 in bank deposits, the statement said. Rogers was ordered to pay restitution to Citizens Bank.
Also sentenced last week was former bank manager Christian Zynga, 47, formerly of Everett. Zynga was sentenced to time served and two years of supervised release, including six months of home detention, for his role in a scheme to falsely inflate taxpayer’s federal income tax refunds and divert a portion of those refunds to accounts controlled by him and others, according to a separate statement from the U.S. attorney’s office.
Zynga had pleaded guilty in October 2021 to one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States.
According to the U.S. attorney’s statement, between 2012 and 2018, Zynga and co-conspirator Boris Shadari said Shadari was a tax professional, particularly for the Congolese community of Greater Boston. They took tax information to a legitimate tax professional until 2017, providing false information concerning their customers’ dependents, dependent and childcare expenses, and business income and losses to inflate the customers’ federal income tax refunds, the statement said.
They then caused the tax refunds to be split between the customers’ bank accounts and accounts they and their co-conspirators controlled.
Then from 2017 to 2018, Zynga and Shadari prepared customers’ tax returns themselves, continuing to inflate refunds by adding false information to the returns and diverting a portion of the customers’ refunds to themselves or accounts they or their co-conspirators controlled, the statement said. The scheme resulted in a tax loss of more than $500,000.
As part of the scheme, Zynga, who worked as a bank manager, opened bank accounts in others’ names for the purpose of receiving the fraudulent federal income tax refunds, the statement said. Zynga also provided Shadari with the names and Social Security numbers of children of an associate who was living abroad at the time so that they could be falsely listed as dependents on returns.
Zynga was a branch manager at a Citizens Bank in Somerville until September 2016 and a vice president and banking center manager at one of Webster Bank’s Cambridge locations beginning in October 2016, according to court documents and Christian Zynga’s LinkedIn profile.
Zynga was ordered to pay a fine of $5,000 and restitution to the IRS of $194,305.
Shadari was sentenced in August to 30 months in prison followed by two years of supervised release after previously pleading guilty to his role in the scheme. Shadari was ordered to pay restitution of $496,082.
