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A 48-year-old Missouri woman has pleaded guilty to living two years as her estranged daughter, who is in her 20s, and embezzling more than $255,000 in social security fraud.
Laura Oglesby will spend five years in prison without parole and, as part of her plea agreement, will pay $17,251 to the university as well as restitution to her daughter Lauren Ashleigh Hays for identity theft.
In 2016, Oglesby obtained a social security card in the name of her daughter, who was 22 at the time, and got a Missouri driving licence, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Missouri said in a statement.
The next year, she used the card to enroll at Southwest Baptist University in Missouri, applying for and received financial aid to attend.
She received $9,400 in federal student loans, $5,920 in Pell Grants, $337 for books she got from the university bookstore, and $1,863 in finance charges, the Daily Mail reported.
During her years as a university student, she paraded herself as a young woman in her twenties, with a job at the city library and boyfriends who believed she was 22-years-old.
“Everyone believed it,” Chief Jamie Perkins of the Mountain View Police Department told The New York Times . “She even had boyfriends that believed that she was that age: 22 years old.”
It was, ironically, thanks to her employment at the library that police were able to track her down. Mountain View Police in August 2018 had been contacted by Arkansas authorities, who said they were searching for a ‘Ms Oglesby’ who had stolen Hay’s identity in 2017 to commit financial fraud and embezzle over $25,000.
Authorities told police that they believed Oglesby was living in Mountain View. Police investigating the issue, tracked her address down after finding out she worked at the city library, Perkins told the New York Times.
“She actually was employed here, which was kind of odd,” Perkins said. “And that’s how we figured out who she was.”
They pulled her over during a traffic stop, wherein she attempted to deny that she was Laura Oglesby. But once they showed her proof of her real identity, she admitted it.
She told police that she had been running ‘for years’ from a domestic violence relationship, Perkins said. “We don’t know her life story outside of what she told us, but we know what happened here.”
She was arrested on bench warrants from Arkansas, with allegations of federal crimes in Arkansas and Missouri.
“She had lived that life for a couple of years and basically just ruined her daughter’s credit,” Perkins said.
In a statement to the New York Times, Southwest Baptist University said that it had “cooperated fully with the investigation.”
“We were saddened to learn about the situation,” the university said. “Our prayers are with all involved.”
~ Via Ottawa Citizen |
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