An Illinois woman hid her mother’s body in a deep freezer in her garage for two years and assumed her identity to keep her Social Security benefits flowing, federal prosecutors said Tuesday.
Eva Bratcher, the daughter, also used her mother’s food stamp benefits and an “alternative” Social Security number to get other food stamp benefits, the Justice Department said.
She was one of a series of Social Security fraud cases the department charged over the past month, totaling $1.3 million in losses.
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“The Social Security Administration’s benefits programs are meant to safeguard America’s elderly and most vulnerable — not to bankroll fraudsters,” said Assistant Attorney General Colin M. McDonald, who leads the DOJ’s National Fraud Enforcement Division.
Ms. Bratcher’s case totaled $21,402.
Another case out of New York totaled $109,746. Authorities said David Darling never informed Social Security of his brother’s death and used his sibling’s ATM card to keep withdrawing money.
Yet another case involved Keshaune Pace, who served as her disabled son’s representative as he got disability benefits. She kept collecting his checks even after he left her custody, authorities said, to the point that she arranged to have another person impersonate her son during a government review of the benefits.
The government has long had trouble with blocking payments to dead people.
In one case, a man collected Social Security benefits paid to his deceased mother for 30 years while he moved addresses and bank accounts to keep up the fiction that she was still alive.
In another case that went to sentencing this summer, a boy who died in a drive-by shooting in 1977, when he was 13 years old, was applying for Social Security benefits some 23 years later, in 2000.
Authorities said a Mexican man had adopted the boy’s identity and used it to collect Social Security disability, Medicaid and food stamps, as well as get a U.S. passport.
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