Date: December 12, 2024 Contact: newsroom@ci.irs.gov Pittsburgh, PA — A resident of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has been sentenced in federal court to 36 months of incarceration, a $100,000 fine, and three years of supervised release on his conviction of bankruptcy fraud and mail fraud, United States Attorney Eric G. Olshan announced today. United States District Judge Christy Criswell Wiegand imposed the sentence on Prasad Margabandhu, of Pittsburgh’s Mt. Lebanon suburb. According to information presented to the Court, from March 2019 to June 2022, Margabandhu engaged in a scheme to defraud the bankruptcy court by filing multiple bankruptcy petitions in the names of companies he controlled called “RSP Pittsburgh” and “Shane Tracy Enterprises” solely to delay efforts by creditors such as the mortgage holder and taxing bodies to execute on judgments against a property at 1925 East Carson Street in Pittsburgh. With respect to the charge of mail fraud, Margabandhu admitted that his insurance claim relating to a June 2022 fire that destroyed the East Carson Street property was fraudulent. In particular, Margabandhu admitted that he had made several materially false statements to the company that insured the property. Margabandhu has been ordered to voluntarily surrender to the United States Marshals Service on January 8, 2025, to begin serving his sentence. Assistant United States Attorneys Gregory C. Melucci and Shaun E. Sweeney prosecuted this case on behalf of the government. United States Attorney Olshan commended the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI), Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Office of the United States Trustee for the investigation leading to the successful prosecution of Margabandhu. IRS-CI is the criminal investigative arm of the IRS, responsible for conducting financial crime investigations, including tax fraud, narcotics trafficking, money-laundering, public corruption, healthcare fraud, identity theft and more. IRS-CI special agents are the only federal law enforcement agents with investigative jurisdiction over violations of the Internal Revenue Code, obtaining a more than a 90 percent federal conviction rate. The agency has 20 field offices located across the U.S. and 12 attaché posts abroad.
