A Black Austin, Minn. woman collected upwards of $300,000 dollars over a span of 25 years in a wild social security scam, according to federal prosecutors. Now, the 54-year-old woman learned her fate after pretending to be someone close to her.
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On Thursday (Aug. 21), Mavious Redmond, 54, was sentenced to serve one year and a day in federal prison after pleading guilty to posing as her dead mother. She will also be under supervised release for another year after her release from prison.
Redmond collected her deceased mom’s Social Security Retirement Insurance Benefits for decades, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Minnesota said. The fraud began in January 1999, after Redmond’s mother died.
She used her mother’s date of birth, Social Security number on official forms, forged her mother’s signature, and even posed as her mom on the phone and during in-person visits to the Social Security Administration (SSA) office. According to reports, Redmond inquired about what would happen hypothetically to her mother’s benefits upon her death when she was informed she would have to notify the SSA and subsequently, benefits would be terminated.
Redmond never reached out to the SSA.
Authorities believe she fraudulently pocketed a total of $360,627. Redmond also stole $3,200 of COVID-19 Economic Impact Payments that were deposited in her deceased mother’s bank account from the IRS.
U.S. Attorney Joseph H. Thompson called Redmond’s scam “brazen and shameless.” He added her mother’s payouts “wasn’t free money. It was taxpayer money, stolen from a program built on the hard work of Minnesotans who paid in every paycheck.”
But her Minnesota federal defender, Robert Meyers, didn’t quite agree, saying his client is “not a hardened criminal” in court documents. “Mavious Redmond’s crime was a crime of opportunity born of desperation,” he added. “This fraud was not so that she could live large.” Meyers argued Redmond lived with her parents her entire life, and when her mother died, she was left to survive on her $8/hour job at Subway and no support system. She relied on food pantries to get by, Meyers said per court documents, and got a job at McDonald’s after her fraud was uncovered in an effort to show she was battling “desperate circumstances.”
Redmond was ultimately fired from McDonald’s after her employer found out about her charges.
“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. We will not let it stand,” Thompson said. “We will keep bringing prosecutions until every fraudster in Minnesota understands there is a price for stealing from the taxpayers.”
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