A mother from Modesto, California, is facing close to twenty years in prison after pleading guilty to conspiring with her son to file fraudulent stimulus checks that totaled nearly $150,000.
As reported by KTVU in the San Francisco Bay Area, Sheila Denise Dunlap admitted late last week that she and her son, who is on death row at San Quentin, were able to garner the personal information of more than 9,000 individuals to apply for federal government-issued stimulus payments in 2020.
Getting Non-Filers’ Information
Dunlap’s son—identified only by the initials D.W.—sent her the personal information of his fellow prisoners along with information of other inmates whom they suspected might qualify as non-filers for their 2018 or 2019 tax returns.
In all, investigators confirmed that Dunlap used her own bank account information to receive more than $145,000 via the stimulus checks.
The fifty-one-year-old was charged by a federal indictment last May with engaging in a wire fraud conspiracy to file dozens of fraudulent applications for the economic impact payments (EIP). The EIP program was part of the CARES Act, which was signed into law in March 2020 to address the economic impacts of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Eligible households at the time received as much as $1,200 per adult and $500 for a qualifying child.
Dunlap is scheduled for her sentencing hearing on June 24.
Warning to Americans
It appears that the Internal Revenue Service has long been aware of such…