Federal prosecutors say Ashley Brown and Amanda Brown Lundquist ran a two-year gift card and identity theft scheme across three Western Washington counties. The mechanism was small. The pattern is not.
Federal prosecutors say a healthcare worker in Miami photographed patient records with his cellphone and sold them to a buyer who resold the lists for as much as $7,000 each. The numbers belonged to more than 6,000 Medicare beneficiaries who never knew their files were leaving the room.
Christopher Staggs ran his pandemic unemployment scheme out of a Chicago LLC and kept a ledger of the people whose identities fueled it. On June 9, 2026, a federal judge gave him two years.
Daiwor Woah-Tee ran a tax preparation business in Belcamp, Maryland for nearly seven years. Federal prosecutors say what he actually ran was a pipeline that turned other people's identities into refund checks and pandemic unemployment benefits, $4 million worth, before the pipeline finally showed.
Tamera Ruth Powers, 68, of Tonganoxie, Kansas, drew government benefits under two names for nearly two decades. One of the names belonged to a relative who had been dead since 1977.
Terry Chen got six years for a $3.5 million pandemic unemployment fraud. The piece nobody talks about is the contractor who sat at a state laptop and turned the locks off from the inside.