A judge sentenced a woman to one year and a few days in prison after federal prosecutors caught on to her Social Security scheme, impersonating her deceased mother for 25 years to collect benefits, USA Today reports.
The daughter of the year is Mavious Redmond of Austin, Minnesota, who fraudulently collected $360,627 by pretending to be her deceased mother to claim Social Security Retirement Insurance Benefits. The fraud scheme started in 1999 following her mother’s death. Until 2024, Redmond used her mother’s identity, using biographical information including her birth date and Social Security number, on official forms. When necessary, Redmond forged her mother’s signature and acted as her mother during phone calls and in-person visits to the Social Security Administration (SSA) office.
In a statement, U.S. Attorney Joseph H. Thompson labeled Redmond’s scamming ways as “brazen and shameless.” “This wasn’t free money. It was taxpayer money, stolen from a program built on the hard work of Minnesotans who paid in every paycheck,” he said.
After her mother passed away, Redmond called the SSA offices to hypothetically inquire about how the benefits would be terminated if she died. Officials told her that she would be required to notify the SSA of her mother’s death so the benefits could be terminated; however, Redmond never did.
While Redmond’s attorney, Robert Meyers, labeled his client as “not a hardened criminal,” her scheme included fraudulently taking $3,200 of COVID-19 Economic Impact Payments that the IRS processed into her dead mother’s bank account. However, Meyers says this was all out of desperation. “Mavious Redmond’s crime was a crime of opportunity born of desperation,” he said.
“This fraud was not so that she could live large.”
After living with her parents her entire life, the 54-year-old was forced to survive with no support system following her mother’s death. Redmond worked full-time at a local
Subway, earning $8 an hour and relying on food pantries, but after her scheme was uncovered, she secured employment at a McDonald’s, working 25 hours a week for eight months. However, once the fast food chain learned of her Social Security scam, she was fired.Describing herself as a housing stabilization advocate, Redmond moved to the Twin Cities area, living in a homeless shelter and actively applying for jobs.
As Redmond will be on supervised release for a year once released from prison, Thompson says her case is just a small area of growing concern about the fraud crisis within the nation. “Cases like this are part of the broader fraud crisis gripping our state, where too many see taxpayer programs as their own personal piggy banks,” he said, according to KARE 11
.“We will not let it stand. We will keep bringing prosecutions until every fraudster in Minnesota understands there is a price for stealing from the taxpayers.”
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