From a press release:
Eric Lemoyne Willis, 46, of West Sacramento, was sentenced today to four years in prison for conspiracy to defraud the United States, theft of government property, and aggravated identity theft, U.S. Attorney Phillip A. Talbert announced.
According to court documents, Willis and co-defendants, Darron Dimitri Ross, 36, of Charlotte, North Carolina, and Joshua Bilal George, 39, of San Diego, conspired to steal public money from the Social Security Administration (SSA). Willis worked as an SSA Operations Supervisor in Sacramento and Lodi from 2015 until his departure in January 2018. During this timeframe, Willis used his authority as an SSA employee to access the confidential Social Security records of numerous Social Security beneficiaries. These records contained personally identifiable information (PII) including names, addresses, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, account numbers, family information, and benefit payment amounts. Willis would seek out PII for beneficiaries who used direct deposit for payment of large benefits. Willis then gave this PII to Ross who resided in North Carolina.
Ross and George’s roles in these crimes included calling numerous SSA field offices across the country and using the stolen PII to impersonate the beneficiaries. Ross also opened at least 44 online bank accounts under fraudulent identities to receive diverted SSA benefit payments. If Ross succeeded in convincing an SSA representative that he was the beneficiary, he would request that the beneficiary’s direct deposit account be changed to one of the conspirators’ fraudulent accounts. ...
As a manager myself, it always saddens me to see how often these insider fraud schemes involve managers. SSA and the public we serve rightfully expect the employees appointed to management positions to set the bar for ethics and integrity, modeling ethical behavior for those we supervise and monitor for any improper conduct. Instead, some of our ranks choose to limbo right under that bar. Shameful.
ReplyDeleteA. HOD
It should not be easy to change direct deposit destination accounts. At least Social Security should first send a letter to the recipient at their home address notifying them that a change has been requested and allowing them time to prevent it if they did not request it.
ReplyDeleteI recently applied for retirement benefits online, including provided banking information. In this case, they say I will get a letter in the mail about 30 days before benefits start. So there is an offline component. I don't know how easy it would be to change your mailing address, but if someone tried to do this, I assume a letter would be sent to the old address, again allowing a fraudulent change to be stopped.
@156 It's not infrequent that when someone calls to change their bank account information that they have closed the account money was sent to most recently. Mailing a letter to them may prevent some fraud but it would be burdensome for many SSA beneficiaries. Even if the person has not closed the account, is it good service to take more than one check deposit to change everyone's direct deposit.
ReplyDeleteWhile all fraud is terrible, I am not sure your suggestion is worth it for the public in general.
I wonder how they figured out who was involved in this fraud. It would make an interesting story I'd think.
The guy in San Diego, George, worked for FPS in Sacramento earlier and when he was in San Diego was promoted to Area Commander. Read that in a release from OIG.
ReplyDeleteanon@1:56pm,
ReplyDeleteThere is exactly such a letter sent out with every direct deposit change.
However, it doesn't work well. For one, the agency uses language that doesn't mean a lot to the targets of these scams - the sick, elderly and mentally slower individuals.
Instead of the current "We are sending your money to the financial institution of your choice", the letter should say simply in large, bold type "Your direct deposit has changed. We are sending your money to a new bank and/or account. If you didn't tell us to do this, call us right away!".
There is also the issue of scammers changing the claimant's address before doing the direct deposit change, which totally eliminates the effectiveness of the letter.
Another thing that would help would be putting a one month delay (after the coming payment due date) on the changes done via telephone and/or online to give the claimants time to react. As it is, the scammers have the Treasury cutoff dates and try to do the changes right on cutoff day to maximize their ability to steal the money before the letter gets to the claimant. The current incompetence of the US Postal Service doesn't help.
However, in the end, there are only two things that will slow down the scammers. The first is to eliminate debit card/online banks from the equation. Don't allow direct deposit to them, and fraud will drop. Hell, IRS tax fraud (that ballooned when IRS began allowing debit card/online banks) also would drop if they would do the same thing.
The second is to make financial institutions who deposit checks into an account where the person the check is made payable to isn't even on the title of the account liable for the funds. In short, if the account titling doesn't match the check titling, they should bounce the deposit back to Treasury. You'd be shocked, but the majority of the megabanks don't do this. They just put the check into whatever account it is directed to without even bothering to match the account owner to the check.
None of this will ever happen. SSA won't do it, because it would "interfere" with their mis-guided crusade to put everything as online services for everyone whether they want it or not. Outlawing debit cards would not fly because the financial industry has a lot of lobbyists with deep pockets and thick checkbooks to use, and Congress just loves getting their greedy and corrupt hands on that money.
Instead of the current "We are sending your money to the financial institution of your choice", the letter should say simply in large, bold type "Your direct deposit has changed. We are sending your money to a new bank and/or account. If you didn't tell us to do this, call us right away!".
ReplyDeleteThis is the most reasonable thing said on this blog in a long long time.
Only 4 years? That'll teach 'em! *eye roll*. Should be 10 years MINIMUM for impersonating a beneficiary and another 10-20 for defrauding the USA, and another 10 for conspiring to defraud the USA. Since it's illegal to open fraudulent account's, One year per account.... So add 44 years on that two 20 years for impersonation of a beneficiary/defrauding the USA AND the accounts? That's fair! 74+ years is a sufficient sentence. A scammer is always a scammer. In 4 years, they'll be out finding someone else to scam. Would save a lot of people in the future from yet another scam.
ReplyDelete@11:07
ReplyDelete"The SSA has identified over 200 beneficiaries nationwide who were targeted by these crimes, and it suffered at least $696,912 in fraud losses caused by the defendants’ offenses. The defendants spent the proceeds of their crimes on, among other things, trips to Las Vegas and luxury items including Rolex watches. During sentencing, the Court ordered Willis to pay full restitution to the SSA."
I agree with you. Four years is too short a sentence. Ten years would be a good start but more than that would be ok, too. Draconian sentences may not deter some crimes, but I think white collar criminals do calculate the risk.
I worked with this Operations Supervisor throughout his career in SSA, starting at the entry level. Most of of were quite surprised when he was promoted to a manager position since he was only an average technical SR/CR. And he always was one of the "fast and loose" kind of employees who took shortcuts in order to resolve processing goals. For instance, a $5K refund on an SSI OP was input incorrectly, and as OS, his job was to resolve the issue. He did not solve the problem, but he did take some action to get it off the list. So when I looked at the case, it appeared that I was going to need to issue the $5K back to the recipient. Since that made no sense to me, that someone who make the same refund twice voluntarily, it took several employees to dig into the remittance records and figure out why.
ReplyDeleteHe also regularly hit on female employees and even female visitors to the office. He may have gotten lectured by the upper management, but there weren't any serious consequences. He got bored with his job as OS. I don't think it fit his image of who he was. He even had a temporary detail to OIG, not as an investigative agent (who could carry weapons) like he wanted to be, but a manager of paperwork and OIG referrals. He wanted bigger things, but had hit the top of his SSA career, he had already been raised to the top of his incompetency. And in SSA, incompetency seems to never be a reason to get rid of an employee. Criminal activity is.
Regarding an average claims representative being promoted to supervisor, the skills needed for supervisor are quite a bit different than those needed to be a claims representative.
DeleteThe most knowledgeable claims representative I knew was promoted to supervisor, and while technically very proficient, she was a terrible supervisor. But she wasn't a criminal.