A former tax processing assistant of a Honolulu accounting firm is going to federal prison for more than five years for using clients’ personal and financial information to steal from them.
Crystal Ann-Marie Lehualani Gabriel was known as Crystal Carvalho-PakChong when she pleaded guilty in December to federal identity theft and wire fraud charges. She assumed her maiden name in February after getting divorced.
Senior U.S. District Judge Helen Gillmor sentenced
Gabriel to 70 months in prison Thursday. She handed Gabriel the mandatory two-year prison term for aggravated identity theft and added 46 months for wire fraud. The law requires defendants to serve their punishment for identity theft apart from the sentences
of any other federal crimes.
Gillmor did, however, order that Gabriel’s federal sentences run at the same time as any punishment a state judge might impose later this month. Gabriel is scheduled to get sentenced Wednesday in state Circuit Court for insurance fraud and attempted theft. At the same hearing
Gabriel is expected to get
her deferral for forgery and another attempted theft
revoked and to get
resentenced.
Gabriel admitted that sometime before August 2016 to Feb. 27, 2018, she transferred $295,158 from clients’ accounts into new accounts she opened in their names at banks and brokerage houses or to her own credit card and brokerage accounts.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Lawrence Tong says the affected financial institutions were able to block or freeze all but $63,645 of the transferred money.
Gillmor ordered Gabriel to pay back that money to four separate financial institutions and signed a forfeiture judgment in the same amount.
Gabriel asked Gillmor for leniency and was hoping for
a federal sentence of no more than five years, to match what she expects to get in her state cases.
“I’m sorry for all the horrible things that I have done in my life,” she said, “I’ve taken a lot for granted in my life.”
Gabriel said in a letter to Gillmor that she committed her crimes when she was struggling with methamphetamine and gambling addiction. She says she has been clean for the past two years.
Tong argued against a lower sentence. He said
when FBI agents questioned Gabriel in February 2017, she lied about how many clients she victimized and how much money she stole. She then committed the state crimes for which she is getting sentenced next week.
