A woman from Modesto pleaded guilty in San Francisco federal court. She is said to engage in identity theft and claimed more than $145,000 in stimulus checks as reported by Kron4, which serves the bay area of San Francisco.
EIP Program
The Economic Impact Payments(EIP), also known as Stimulus Check, was a part of the CARES act. The CARES Act is a federal relief bill signed into law in 2020. This bill addresses the economic backdrop during the pandemic. Under this act, people who made less than $99,000 on 2019 income tax returns were eligible for EIP funds. These funds are for those whose income was significantly low. The payment is $1200 per adult and $500 for a child.
Charges
Sheila Denise Dunlap is a 51-year-old woman who was charged with a federal indictment in May 2021. She was engaged in a wire fraud conspiracy to file fraud applications for stimulus checks.
Plea agreement
According to Kron4, in her plea agreement, Dunlap revealed that she conspired between March 2020 and July 2020 along with her son to obtain the information and apply for the funds. At that time, her son was serving a sentence at San Quentin State Prison. Her son advised her to file fraud EIP claims using the information of the youngest adults on the list.
Dunlap admitted that she gathered all the data to file fraud claims for EIP funds. All the data was gathered from the Internal Revenue Service’s online EIP portal. In April 2020, her son and someone made an excel spreadsheet of about 9,000 people, including their personal information. In all her applications, she had attached her Bank of America account. That account was noted to receive all the stimulus checks. She had filed claims of a total of $145,000 in stimulus check payments.
Pleaded guilty
Dunlap pleaded guilty with a penalty of 20 years in prison and a fine of $250,000. She also pleaded guilty to identity theft, carrying a two-year penalty.
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