Home repairmen sentenced to prison for tax fraud after failing to report income earned overcharging elderly clients for repairs

Date: Feb. 18, 2026

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Charlotte, NC - Two home repairmen were sentenced to prison today for failing to report more than $1.5 million in income they earned from overcharging elderly customers for home repair services, announced Russ Ferguson, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of North Carolina.

David Angelo Quick of Charlotte and Tony Joshua Christo, formerly of Charlotte, now residing in Florida, previously pleaded guilty to filing a false tax return.

Quick was sentenced to 20 months in prison followed by a year of supervised release and was ordered to pay $296,300 in restitution to IRS. Christo received 15 months imprisonment, one year of supervised release, and was ordered to pay $227,548 in restitution to the IRS.

Donald "Trey" Eakins, Special Agent in Charge of the Internal Revenue Service, Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI), Charlotte Field Office, and Rodney Hopkins, Inspector in Charge of the Atlanta Division of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) which oversees North Carolina join U.S. Attorney Ferguson in making today's announcement.

According to plea documents and the court hearings, from 2018 to 2021, Quick and Christo provided home repair and improvement services, as well as car repair services, to elderly clients. During that time, the defendants collectively received more than $1.5 million from elderly customers but failed to report any of this income on their federal income tax returns filed with the IRS. Quick, who was not a licensed contractor, owned and operated David Quick Home Improvements, which provided roofing, painting, driveway construction and other home services; Christo, Quick's brother, worked with him.

Filed documents show that the defendants defrauded some of the elderly clients by overcharging them for repairs. According to court records, Quick would generally approach elderly people about fixing damage to their cars, often in the supermarket parking lot. Once they hired him to do this work, Quick would eventually convince the elderly clients that they had all sorts of problems around their homes and that he and Christo could fix those problems. Then, the repairmen charged the elderly clients outrageous amounts to fix the purported problems, such as painting garage floors, paving a driveway, and replacing windows.

Court records also show that the defendants received payment for their services, but they failed to report their income to the IRS.

The defendants will be ordered to report to the Federal Bureau of Prisons upon designation of a federal facility.

The IRS-CI and the USPIS investigated the case.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Caryn Finley of the U.S. Attorney's Office in Charlotte prosecuted the case.

IRS-CI is the law enforcement 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. It is the only federal law enforcement agency with investigative jurisdiction over violations of the Internal Revenue Code. IRS-CI has 18 field offices located across the U.S. and maintains an international presence through attaché posts abroad.