Newport News woman sentenced for stealing pandemic unemployment benefits

A Newport News woman with a lengthy criminal history was sentenced to seven years and four months in prison for participating in a scheme to fraudulently collect unemployment insurance benefits in the names of prison inmates and others during the COVID-19 pandemic, federal prosecutors said.

Lakeia Simone Grant, 40, who also went by the names Lakeia Shepperd, Lakeia Williams, Lakeia Miles and Chris Lover, was convicted of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and aggravated identity theft, according to court documents. The scheme ran from May 2020 to October 2021 and exploited the federal government’s pandemic-era expansion of unemployment insurance benefits.

Grant used the personal identifying information of prison inmates and others to file fraudulent claims with the Virginia Employment Commission, which administers unemployment compensation in Virginia, prosecutors said. The fraudulent filings falsely attested that the beneficiaries were ready, willing and able to work and had lost their jobs due to COVID-19.

To carry out the scheme, Grant conspired with inmate recruiters to gather personal information from prisoners and then filed claims on their behalf, according to court documents. She also filed fraudulent claims for people outside prison, either using stolen identifying information or in exchange for a cut of the benefit payments received.

Grant and her co-conspirators filed approximately 38 successful unemployment claims in the names of inmates, generating roughly $546,576 in fraudulent payments, prosecutors said. The Virginia Employment Commission recovered a portion of the funds, leaving an actual loss of approximately $480,392.76. At least four additional fraudulent claims filed for non-inmates resulted in a further loss of approximately $107,670.

Grant is a five-time convicted felon, according to court documents. Her prior convictions include obstruction of justice and petit larceny in 2005, unlawful wounding in 2008, and two separate convictions in Chesterfield Circuit Court in 2010 and 2014 for conspiring to obtain money by false pretense and obtaining money by false pretense. In 2019, she was convicted in Wake County, North Carolina, for conspiring to commit financial card fraud, and later that year for failing to return a rental car.

The case was investigated by the FBI’s Norfolk Field Office, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Inspector General and the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General. Assistant U.S. Attorney Mack Coleman prosecuted the case.

The prosecution was highlighted as part of the Justice Department’s broader anti-fraud enforcement efforts, including the recently announced National Fraud Enforcement Division, which focuses on investigating and prosecuting the misuse of taxpayer funds.