Have you ever experienced the blood-boiling irritation induced by people who refuse to own up to their wrongdoings, even after they’ve been caught red-handed? Take the recent case of a 29-year-old Ohio man, who, after a three-year stint illegally collecting food stamps, blamed his $15,818 fraud on an innocent application error, as reported by the Lima News. (Now he can do another kind of stint.)
Three years after this Ohio man applied for, and began receiving, food stamps, the Allen County Department of Job and Family Services noticed that his application lacked a key piece of information: the income earned by his self-employed, live-in girlfriend. Ohio, like many states, requires that public assistance program applicants report their full household income, to capture the full scope of their needs. The state uses such disclosures to detect fraudulent and excessive disbursements, of course, but also to determine how to best improve the applicant’s living standards.
This Buckeye bilker landed before a judge, not long after the state benefits office noticed the unreported income. The court convicted him of grand theft, a fourth-degree felony. But here’s the clincher: When ordered to pay back the cost of the stolen food stamps, do you know what this manhad the audacity to say to the presiding judge? That he simply would use his monthly Social Security disability check, issued by the state of Ohio, on taxpayer dollars, to pay restitution. (We’ve put a man on the moon, developed self-driving cars and can have our groceries delivered by drone, yet our society still has to suffer fraudsters like this.)
The judge subsequently sentenced him to three months in prison, followed by five years of supervised release. (Turns out, a brazen lack of accountability is not a successful formula for getting out of jail free.) Lacking the authority to impede the defendant’s plans to pay back the state with its own money, the judge was “left shaking his head.”
People such as this defendant, who boldly and unapologetically exploit a system that is designed to feed our most vulnerable citizens, actually serve as extra incentive to be vigilant about fraud. While social services abusers tend to be quite resourceful (oh, the irony), their hubris always catches up with them—often, in prison.
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