Woman is arrested in theft of pandemic aid
The Victorville resident is charged with fraud in a scheme that netted $515,138.
A Victorville woman was arrested Wednesday on suspicion of stealing more than $500,000 in pandemic unemployment relief by impersonating people incarcerated in California’s state prisons, federal authorities said.
Cynthia Ann Hernandez, 32, also known as Cynthia Roberts, is charged with four counts of mail fraud, two counts of aggravated identity theft and one count of access device fraud in excess of $1,000, according to a federal grand jury indictment filed Thursday.
From June to August 2020, Hernandez filed fraudulent applications for pandemic-related unemployment insurance benefits with the California Employment Development Department, according to the U.S. attorney’s office for the Central District of California, which serves seven counties, including Los Angeles, Orange and Riverside.
Hernandez filed the applications in the names of people who were incarcerated in the state prison system, claiming that the applicants lived in Los Angeles and Orange counties, prosecutors said.
State officials authorized Bank of America to issue debit cards in the names of the people listed in the applications, prosecutors said. The cards were mailed to Hernandez, who allegedly used them to withdraw cash from ATMs and at banking centers.
In all, Hernandez filed at least 29 fraudulent applications, “resulting in losses to EDD and the [U.S. Department of the Treasury] of approximately $515,138,” prosecutors said.
She is scheduled for arraignment Thursday in U.S. District Court in Riverside.
Hernandez’s arrest comes as state and federal officials continue to investigate widespread pandemicrelated fraud.
State officials announced in June that they’d recovered $1.1 billion in illegally obtained unemployment insurance funds.
“Fraudsters and criminal organizations ripped off California, along with every other state, during one of the worst crises in history,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said at the time. “We’re taking aggressive action to return that money to the taxpayers.”
EDD officials were overwhelmed with unemployment benefit applications at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic after Newsom issued the nation’s first statewide stay-at-home order, which forced many businesses to close.
The agency received at least 26.4 million claims and paid $180 billion in benefits. But about $20 billion of those payments went to scammers who posed as prison inmates — or, in one instance, faked being Sen. Dianne Feinstein — to fool state officials into sending them checks.