More than 450,000 people are buried in Rose Hills Memorial Park in Whittier, California, which, by sheer size of its property, is the largest cemetery on the continent.
One of those is Carlos Ramon Obregon, who died just a month after his 14th birthday in 1977. Authorities say he was gunned down in a drive-by shooting.
His gravestone bears an image of him alongside depictions of a praying angel and Our Lady of Guadalupe.
His mother is quite sure he is dead.
She even testified to that fact in court.
Yet there was Obregon, applying for a replacement Social Security card in 2000, some 24 years after he was slain.
Over the next 24 years, the man known to the world as Carlos Obregon would scam Social Security, the Department of Health and Human Services, the State Department, the Treasury Department and Idaho’s Transportation Department, walking away with nearly $284,000 in taxpayer money.
The man who claimed to be Obregon has been insistent to the last.
Even as a judge slapped him with a five-year sentence earlier this month, his attorney was still calling him Obregon and delivering an outlandish tale about how he came to be alive, despite evidence to the contrary.
The defendant claimed he was shot in the head during a drive-by, but it was when he was 12, not 13, and he lost all memory of his life before that. He said his parents sent him to Mexico to recover, but the woman they asked to take him abandoned him once across the border, leaving him to live on the streets for the next two decades until, somehow, he made contact with his father, who still had his birth certificate and urged him to return to the U.S.
All told, he received $177,516.19 in Social Security disability payments, $91,145.21 in Medicaid, $12,166 in SNAP benefits and $3,200 in pandemic stimulus checks. He obtained IDs from Idaho in 2002, 2010 and 2014, and in 2022 obtained a Real ID-compliant Star Card from the state. He also obtained a U.S. passport in Obregon’s name in 2012 and used it to travel to and from Mexico multiple times.
Documents in his court case suggest he was finally spotted when he applied for a passport renewal in 2024.
“Identity thieves who exploit the identities of deceased Americans cause real harm,” said Jonathan P. Kazmar, special agent in charge of the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service in San Francisco. “In this case, the defendant assumed the identity of a deceased American teenager and used it for years to commit serious fraud.”
The government’s habit of paying dead people is coming to light as the Trump administration focuses on fraud and just how much money the federal government seems to leak to scammers.
Social Security is particularly susceptible to death fraud, but it is not the only program.
A Florida woman collected $300,000 in veterans’ benefits intended for her deceased daughter.
A U.S. Department of Energy employee pleaded guilty on April 9 to stealing federal pension benefits of a deceased relative.
In North Carolina, Crystal Sherrell Jackson was sentenced Aug. 27 for stealing $1.6 million in bogus Medicaid reimbursements for more than 300 people to whom she claimed to have given urine drug tests or psychotherapy services. They included children, prison inmates and dead people.
In 2020, the IRS acknowledged making 1.1 million pandemic stimulus payments to dead people, totaling $1.4 billion.
The agency, in its rush to get money out the door, did not run the names by Social Security’s Death Master File.
Six months later, only about 5% of the checks had been returned.
Still, Social Security produces some of the craziest cases.
In one case out of St. Louis, a woman who worked as an embalmer at a funeral home kept cashing her dead grandmother’s Social Security payments.
In Philadelphia, a woman is awaiting sentencing in a case where prosecutors said she collected 10 years of Social Security benefits in the name of a woman who had been killed and buried under 6 feet of concrete in the basement of a row house.
Then there was Ellis Kingsep, who managed to keep his mother bureaucratically alive for roughly 30 years after authorities believed she had died.
The last time anyone other than her son saw Leitha Aude Kingsep alive was in 1993.
Social Security was still paying her in 2023.
For the son, it was a gargantuan effort that involved bank accounts scattered around the globe and a chain of private mailbox services that kept shifting, all so Kingsep could collect and send mail in his mother’s name to keep up the fiction that she was alive.
From 1995 to 2023, the government paid $423,215 in benefits to the mother’s accounts.
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