CHRISTIAN COUNTY, KY (CHRISTIAN COUNTY NOW) – A 58-year-old former pastor from Crofton has been sentenced to prison for fraud and tax offenses.
Marvin Upton was the pastor at Crofton Pentecostal Church until recently. The bank fraud charges arose from Upton’s scheme during the years 2013 to 2016 to defraud one of his elderly parishioners who suffered from dementia, according to a news release from the Western District of Kentucky United States Attorney’s Office. During that same time period Upton also submitted multiple false tax returns which omitted income from the fraud scheme.
According to court documents, he was sentenced to two years and three months in prison and was ordered to pay restitution in the amount of $500,000 to the victim’s estate and $222,037 in restitution to the IRS. The sentence will be followed by 3 years of supervised release, for 3 counts of bank fraud and 3 counts of filing false tax returns
The case was investigated by the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation, Assistant U.S. Attorneys Madison T. Sewell and Corinne E. Keel prosecuted the case. It was investigated and prosecuted as part of the National Elder Justice Task Force and the Kentucky Elder Justice Task Force.
“The Department of Justice’s mission of its Elder Justice Initiative is to support and coordinate the Department’s enforcement and programmatic efforts to combat elder abuse, neglect and financial fraud and scams that target our nation’s older adults,” said the news release. “In response to the growing need and targeting areas of greatest concern, the Department of Justice stood up 10 task forces made up of 11 federal districts to combat a variety of elder abuse, including elder financial exploitation.”
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