A former New York State Assembly candidate used fake donations and forged signatures to fraudulently inflate the share of public matching funds he received in last year’s election, federal prosecutors said on Friday.

The former candidate, Dao Yin, was charged with wire fraud in a federal criminal complaint. He was scheduled to make his initial appearance before a magistrate judge in Federal District Court in Brooklyn on Friday afternoon.

The charging of Mr. Yin, a Democrat who ran for a State Assembly seat in Queens, came a year after The New York Times published an investigation that found he appeared to have listed dozens of fake donors to increase his allotment of money under a new state matching-funds program meant to increase the power of donors making small political contributions.

Prosecutors said Mr. Yin, 62, had abused the system by using a scheme that The Times found yielded him $162,000 in matching funds. It was one of the largest sums received by an Assembly candidate last year, despite Mr. Yin’s relatively unheralded status.