Calgary man guilty of using employment scam to steal identities for take tax refunds

A Calgary Man will serve 14 months in custody after pleading guilty to one count of "obtaining and using another's identity to commit an indictable offense."

According to the CRA, Mr. Chun Zhu aka Ted Zhu of Calgary began gathering personal information from individuals in March of 2018 who applied on fake job postings he set up. Zhu used the information in he gathered in 2019 to apply for personal tax returns.

Zhu is reported to have filed as many as 317 personal tax returns.

According to the CRA, the claims resulted in unwarranted tax refunds totally more than $760,000. The returns were all deposited into a bank account that Mr. Zhu controlled.

Zhu was sentenced earlier in October and was given an eight month sentence for fraud and six month sentence for using another's identity to commit an indictable offense.

These two sentences are to be serviced concurrently, followed by 18 months of probation.

According to the CRA cheating on your taxes affects the services and programs we all rely on to improve our quality of life.

"While most Canadians obey the tax laws and pay their taxes, the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) maintains various programs to protect the integrity of the tax system," the CRA stated in their media release.