Supposedly, a “bad hair day” can determine how your day goes. (If you feel like every hair is in place, your confidence is automatically boosted; however, if it’s rainy outside and your coiffure tends to frizz, you may need to hide your hairdo under a hat for the day.) A story posted on FBI.gov tells how two criminals victimized a variety of naïve young women and their financial institutions and bilked the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Medicaid and a New York child care program through the guise of a fictitious “hair show.”
The article details that a woman, who acted as a recruiter, visited shopping malls from New York City to Washington, DC where many young women shopped. She and a male co-conspirator ran a check kiting scheme by telling their unsuspecting victims they would be compensated for participating in a “hair show” if they would provide their bank account numbers with debit card information including PINs. (This request alone should have raised suspicion, but perhaps these young ladies envisioned themselves signing a modeling contract, who knows?) The criminals declared that the victims’ accounts would be used for deposits and withdrawals of funds. (That part was true, but the young ladies didn’t understand that their bank accounts would be emptied before the financial institutions would realize the scheme.)
Over a period of five years, the woman used $230,000 that she stole from her victims’ accounts to pay for plastic surgery, a car loan and her $2,100 a month rent for a luxury apartment. During this time, she also fraudulently obtained SNAP, Medicaid, child care program benefits and a deferment on about $100,000 in student loans. (She claimed she was living with her father at the time, was unemployed and that family members were paying her bills.) Her addiction to lying also enabled her to submit false reference letters, employment information, W-2 forms, loan and rent applications and bank account statements to back up her need for public assistance. (Could she possibly dig herself any deeper into a fraud hole?)
After a complicated investigation that included piecing together testimony from the victims, financial institution video footage showing the co-conspirators completing transactions and E-Z Pass toll receipts to prove the two had traveled to the targeted areas, the criminals were caught. The 34-year-old woman pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bank fraud and three other counts of bank fraud. She was sentenced to 15 months in prison to be followed by three years of supervised release and ordered to pay restitution of $202,634.32 plus a special assessment of $400. Her co-conspirator was sentenced to an 80 month sentence in prison for his part in the scheme.
Obviously, this woman saw the ruse as a “career” and didn’t hesitate to victimize as many people as possible. Her illegal acts caused approximately $600,000 in losses to many financial institutions, not to mention the illegally-obtained funds from multiple government benefits programs. It’s a safe assumption that this woman is about to have one very long bad hair day that will last for the next four years. (She’d better grab a hat and hunker down since she’s not going to be receiving any professional hair services in the near future.)
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