From MyNewsLA.com:
A former employee of the Social Security Administration district office in the Antelope Valley who admitted stealing over $25,000 from beneficiaries was sentenced Thursday in federal court to probation and restitution.
Dion Bright Jr., 34, of Lancaster, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Fernando Olguin, who ordered restitution in the amount of the theft along with a year’s probation.
Bright pleaded guilty in July 2025 in downtown Los Angeles to a misdemeanor count of theft of government property.
As part of his job duties at the SSA field office in Lancaster, Bright would use a database to access claimants’ records to process claims for the aged, blind or disabled, and for workers who lost income due to physical or mental impairment.
During the scheme, from September 2022 to June 2023, Bright accessed beneficiaries’ SSA records, changed their mailing addresses so that they would not receive notices that their account information had been revised, and rerouted their benefits to a U.S. Bank account he controlled, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. …
The SSA employee was probably auditioning to being a future DOGE employee. The judge should be investigated for giving such a light sentence. The public depends on their SSA checks and for many it’s their only source of income.
ReplyDeleteThis is so much worse than other SSA employee frauds because real beneficiaries had the money they were relying on diverted. In other ones I've seen, they add an auxillary and keep it under the family maximum, or take early retirement for someone who hasn't claimed yet and wasn't expecting it, or stuff like that. This guy's crime was particularly cruel--and particularly dumb because the victims would catch on fast and tell SSA they didn't get paid. He must have had a great defense attorney or a bad prosecutor.
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