IRVINE -- UC Irvine Police Sgts. Tony Frisbee and Shaun Devlin received the 2008 Investigator of the Year award from the Orange County Financial Crimes Investigator Association presented at OCFCIA's luncheon Nov. 25. Frisbee and Devlin were honored for their successful, five-month investigation into identity thefts and submission of false IRS tax returns that victimized UCI graduate students.

The investigation began in March when several graduate students were told by the IRS that someone else had filed a false tax return using their Social Security number. Crime reports were taken and notices sent to the campus community. More graduate students reported being victimized by the false tax return and refund scam. IT specialists, administrative staff and detectives at UCI worked long hours to locate the source of the information breach, but none was found to have occurred on campus.

The investigators linked several cases to addresses in the Dallas area and identified persons of interest there. In June, they headed to Texas to further investigate the crimes. With assistance from the Dallas County District Attorney's Office, Frisbee and Devlin (along with Detective Caroline Altamirano, Sgt. Manse Sinkey and IT Manager Isaac Straley) were able to determine that the theft of the students' identities occurred in offices of United Healthcare in Dallas. A former employee had illegally downloaded the information from a UHC computer. These investigators found others who may have been involved in the false tax return scheme and turned this information over to the IRS.

In a return trip to the Dallas area, Frisbee, Devlin and Altamirano were armed with a warrant for the arrest of Michael Tyrone Thomas, identified as the person responsible for the thefts of identity from UHC. On July 11, they located Thomas in Fort Worth, Texas, and took him into custody with bail set at $300,000. Thomas remains in custody awaiting trial on charges involving multiple counts of identity theft. Information obtained by these investigators and turned over to the IRS was of assistance when a federal grand jury in Texas indicted six people, including Thomas, for stealing identities and filing false IRS tax returns to obtain fraudulent refunds.

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About the University of California, Irvine: The University of California, Irvine is a top-ranked university dedicated to research, scholarship and community service. Founded in 1965, UCI is among the fastest-growing University of California campuses, with more than 27,000 undergraduate and graduate students and nearly 2,000 faculty members. The third-largest employer in dynamic Orange County, UCI contributes an annual economic impact of $3.6 billion. For more UCI news, visit www.today.uci.edu.

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