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Employees at TD Bank on Post Road called police to report suspicious activity on March 17. The employees told police that a woman and a man had come to the branch two days earlier and opened a checking account and attempted to cash a federal tax refund check worth $8,879, police said.
The bank’s fraud investigators put a hold on the check pending an investigation, and the two had returned to the bank on March 17. The two presented what police later discovered were forged identification cards, including a New York state driver’s license that had a paper mock-up of a New Jersey license attached to the back with a different name, according to the police reports.
Darien Police contacted the Connecticut State Financial Crimes Task Force for help with the investigation. Task Force investigators believe that the two suspects who appeared in Darien last week were part of a group that purchases Social Security numbers for identity theft purposes, and uses those numbers to file fraudulent tax returns for the refund, police said.
Investigators found that the tax check was legitimate, and had been mailed to a Trenton, N.J. address. But the Social Security number attached to the tax return belonged to a woman in Puerto Rico, police said.
Cesar Penson-Perez, 28, of New York, N.Y. and Socorro Delon-Toribio, 37, of the Bronx, N.Y., were both arrested at the scene. Both were charged with second-degree identity theft, second-degree forgery, criminal impersonation, attempted third-degree larceny and conspiracy. Delon-Toribio was held on a $50,000 bond, and Penson-Perez was held on a $100,000 bond. Both are due in court on Thursday, March 27.
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