SSA Employee Alleged To Have Created Fictitious Identities So He Could File False Claims

     From a press release:

A federal grand jury has indicted Cheikh Ahmet Tidiane Cisse, age 43, of Baltimore, Maryland, on federal charges in connection with a scheme in which Cisse allegedly filed fraudulent claims for Social Security benefits using fictitious identities and the identities of actual individuals, and attempted to collected over $236,000.  The indictment was returned on April 3, 2019. ...

Cisse was employed by the Social Security Administration (SSA) as a Claims Specialist.  The 14-count indictment alleges that between July 2018 and March 2019, Cisse used his position at SSA to create fictitious identities within the SSA’s social security number database in order to file fictitious claims for benefits.  The indictment alleges that Cisse used both fictitious identities and the identities of actual individuals to file the fraudulent claims and stole or attempted to steal over $236,000 from SSA.

The indictment alleges that Cisse would input false information into SSA systems indicating that he had witnessed original documents, such as birth certificates, and marriage and divorce decrees, when in fact he had not.  In one instance, when SSA withheld payment due to suspected fraud, the indictment alleges that Cisse contacted SSA’s payment center and falsely relayed that the purported beneficiary had called inquiring about the whereabouts of the payment, which caused the payment center to release the funds.  Cisse allegedly directed payments on the fraudulent claims into accounts he controlled, then spent the funds through cash withdrawals and retail purchases. ...

     I've said it before. Social Security spent a lot of money getting sophisticated software intended to catch sophisticated schemes by attorneys representing Social Security claimants. It looks like what they've found instead has been some not so sophisticated Social Security employee schemes. Anybody at the operational level could have told you, Eric Conn was a bizarre one off.