Granite Falls business owner pleads guilty to tax, credit card fraud

CHARLOTTE — A Granite Falls business owner has pleaded guilty to using tax and credit card fraud to make hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of deposits at casinos.

Prosecutors said 51-year-old James Christopher Robinson pleaded guilty on Wednesday to the federal charges.

Robinson owned several cabinet manufacturing and retail businesses in the Hickory area, according to the United States Attorney’s Office. He confessed to using the companies’ credit cards between March 2020 and April 2023 to make 294 fraudulent credit card charges.

Prosecutors said the charges totaled about $1 million.

Prosecutors said Robinson also used information from checks that customers had written to his companies to make at least four counterfeit checks totaling more than $93,000.

Documents show two of Robinson’s companies failed to fulfill their employment tax obligations for tax years 2017 to 2022. Robinson didn’t account for or pay more than $3.1 million in employment taxes, prosecutors said.

Robinson then used the stolen money to withdraw cash from his business accounts and make “hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash deposits at casinos,” prosecutors said.

Channel 9′s Dave Faherty spoke by phone with a local builder who shared how the fraud worked.

“In order to go ahead and secure the cabinets for their production and delivery time, we would need a credit card on file,” Alex Bailey said. “When he started illegally running the credit cards is when it was really getting out of control. And he would do that to us and we lost $50,000.”

On Wednesday, Robinson pleaded guilty to access device fraud, which has maximum penalty of 15 years in prison, and failure to truthfully account for and pay over trust fund taxes. That has a maximum sentence of at least five years.

Robinson is out on bond while he awaits sentencing. Bailey said he plans to be at Robinson’s sentencing.

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