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A Wisconsin man will go to prison for his involvement in a massive fraud ring that stole thousands of identities — largely from Oregonians, starting with a Medford couple — and has already landed six Nigerian nationals in prison. Curtis Sherman Pethley, 62, was sentenced to nearly five years in prison Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Eugene for his role in an aggravated identity theft conspiracy , in which Pethley acquired prepaid debit cards and put them in victims’ names at the behest of an individual in Nigeria known to him only as “Queen Jenn,” according to a news release issued Wednesday by the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Federal prosecutors say Pethley gave “Queen Jenn” information about how to prepare federal income tax returns and how to calculate withholdings, according to federal prosecutors. Queen Jenn was actually Saheed Animawun of Lagos, Nigeria, brother of one of the convicted fraudsters, Lateef Aina Animawun . Pethley was ordered Wednesday to repay $444,393 in damages he caused to the U.S. government in the scheme between 2011 and 2014, but the entire ring’s roughly 10,000 successfully processed fraudulent tax returns caused government losses of $11.6 million, according to federal prosecutors. Ringleader Emmanuel Oluwatosin Kazeem used tens of thousands of identities taken from Lincoln City-based CICS Employment Services by a Vietnamese hacker to file fraudulent tax returns that were inflated to net returns of roughly $9,000. A Medford couple was among the first to alert the IRS that someone had filed tax returns in their name , sparking an investigation involving nine federal agencies that took investigators across the country to Maryland, Georgia and Illinois. Investigators found that Pethley bought a MyVanilla prepaid debit card that fraudsters used for the ill-gotten refund in the Medford victims’ names from a CVS store in the Chicago suburb of South Barrington, Illinois. A May 2014 search of Pethley’s home in nearby Schaumburg, Illinois, yielded about 150 other prepaid debit cards and money orders totaling close to $50,000, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Pethley is separately serving a five-year prison sentence on a federal child pornography conviction out of Madison, Wisconsin. U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken of Eugene ordered that three years of Pethley’s sentence in the fraud conspiracy be consecutive. Reach reporter Nick Morgan at 541-776-4471 or by email at [email protected].