A Jacksonville-area accountant has been sentenced to two years in federal prison after pleading guilty to lying on tax forms and helping an online romance scammer collect other people’s money.
Iona Coates, 68, was a “money mule” who funneled cash from the scammer’s targets through her bank account and into cryptocurrency even after federal agents warned she could be prosecuted, a prosecutor told U.S. District Court Senior Judge Brian Davis ahead of the sentencing Tuesday.
Coates “is a very lonely woman” who feels mortified she was part of a hustle that cost other people more than $200,000, her attorney told the judge in seeking leniency.
Besides time in prison, the judge ordered Coates to pay $186,000 in restitution owed on her taxes and another $229,000 to compensate victims of the romance scheme.
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Coates, who ran Bits & Bytes Accounting Services out of her longtime Arlington home, pleaded guilty in July to settle two separate criminal prosecutions, one involving taxes and the other the scammer.
Her plea deal on the tax case admitted she falsely claimed on her 2017 taxes that her employer (herself) had withheld $42,500, dramatically affecting the amount she owed. But the body of the agreement said she filed false withholding claims from 2015 to 2020, which increased the amount owed in restitution.
In the romance scam, her bank account was basically used as a drop-off point where wannabe lovers sent money to help a con artist operating somewhere online.
When money showed up in her account, Coates wired it to an account in the BitStamp cryptocurrency exchange or deposited it at bitcoin ATMs, said the plea agreement she signed in July. In just four months in 2021, five people sent a total of almost $230,000 that Coates handled that way, a prosecutor told the judge.
“In essence, Coates was acting as a money mule for the online scammers,” U.S. Justice Department attorney Kevin Schneider wrote in a memo that contended Coates deserved to spend 33 to 41 months behind bars, an amount he said sentencing guidelines recommend.
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Coates’s lawyer, Assistant Federal Public Defender Lisa Call, told the judge her client had lived a clean life and that her actions breaking the law were “uncharacteristic decisions” that shouldn’t require prison.
Call said Coates had already been conned once by a man she met on Our Time, a dating app for people over 50, and quoted a friend of Coates describing the trouble that brought. “’She wanted that guy to be real’,” Call quoted the friend saying. “’She was lonely and just wanted someone to love her.’”
Instead, after U.S. Secret Service agents visited Coates in 2020 and told her she’d been part of a scam, handing her a “romance scam warning letter” their agency uses, she made a connection with another scammer the next year.
“Different name, same game,” Call wrote in her sentencing memo, pointing out press reporting that Americans over age 60 had been bilked for $139 million in one year. “An individual with Ms. Coates’s emotional frailty stood no chance,” Call wrote.
