Timothy Wadsworth

Convicted and sentenced. Wadsworth was convicted of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering and was sentenced on October 23, 2026, to 51 months in prison, ordered to pay $810,965.19 in restitution, and ordered to forfeit $810,956.19 representing the wire-fraud proceeds he received.

Introduction

Timothy Wadsworth, 35, of Rochester, New York, is a serial fraudster whose schemes stretched from unauthorized credit-card processing through pandemic-relief loans and unemployment benefits to a romance scam, and who was sentenced to 51 months in federal prison by U.S. District Judge Frank P. Geraci, Jr. for conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering . Prosecutors tallied his actual and intended losses at approximately $2,059,893 across schemes that ran from March 2020 through September 2021 . The case was announced as part of the Trump Administration’s Task Force to Eliminate Fraud .

Background Information

The core scheme ran on stolen card numbers. Between March 2020 and September 2021, Wadsworth conspired with others to obtain credit-card account numbers from coconspirators and process unauthorized transactions from those accounts, moving the money into his own bank accounts, then into his Coinbase account to purchase Bitcoin, and onward to his coconspirators . Using a Stripe, Inc. merchant account between March 10 and May 15, 2020, he attempted to process 310 payments totaling $1,673,578, of which 116 were initially successful, totaling $730,728.22 — all transactions the account holders never authorized .

The Controversy or Incident That Led to Their Cancellation

The laundering trail was explicit: once card payments cleared, Wadsworth moved funds from Stripe to accounts he owned at HSBC and Evolve Federal Credit Union, then to Coinbase, bought Bitcoin, and pushed it to external addresses, frequently in transactions over $10,000 — including three transfers in late April 2020 of $49,419.99, $45,501.85, and $53,496.75 . Around the same window he filed nine false Economic Injury Disaster Loan applications between May 13, 2020 and May 5, 2021, three of which were approved and paid $161,200 to his accounts, plus six PPP loan applications totaling $91,219 in March–April 2021, two of which were funded for $20,833 and $20,416 — all padded with misrepresentations about revenue and operations . He also collected approximately $65,896 in unemployment benefits between May 2020 and September 2021 from New York State, Washington State, and the Department of Labor while eligible for none of it, and in 2020 ran a romance scheme in which a recently widowed victim, told by a Facebook “oil rig worker” that he needed $42,000 for travel back to the United States, wired the money on March 20, 2020 straight into Wadsworth’s bank account; six other victims lost a further $26,000 .

Public Reaction and Consequences

U.S. Attorney Michael DiGiacomo announced the sentencing, and the investigation was credited to the FBI under Special Agent-in-Charge Allen D. Davis, II, IRS Criminal Investigation under Harry T. Chavis, Jr., the New York State Department of Financial Services under Acting Superintendent Kaitlin Asrow, and the New York State Department of Labor under Commissioner Roberta Reardon, with Assistant U.S. Attorney Katelyn M. Hartford prosecuting . The release tied the case to the National Fraud Enforcement Division created on April 7 and to Vice President J.D. Vance’s whole-of-government Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, framing multi-vector fraudsters like Wadsworth as its target population . The judgment carries restitution of $810,965.19 and forfeiture of $810,956.19, matching the fraud proceeds he personally received .

Current Status

Wadsworth is serving his 51-month sentence, with the restitution and forfeiture judgments entered against him . The sentencing closed a case whose conduct predated his conviction window’s end in September 2021 by four years, and which prosecutors grouped with the pandemic-fraud matters now being driven through the fraud task force pipeline .

Impact on Their Career/Life

Wadsworth’s ledger — cards, EIDL, PPP, unemployment, romance fraud — made him a one-man catalog of modern fraud categories, and the sentence treats the whole spread as one conspiracy rather than separate sins. At 35 he exits with a multi-year federal term, a restitution and forfeiture judgment of roughly $811,000 each, and his name attached to the fraud task force’s early run of announced results.

Sources

• U.S. Attorney’s Office, Western District of New York, “Rochester man going to prison for conspiring to defraud victims, including taxpayers, of more than $2,000,000 and money laundering,” October 23, 2026 — source