While the feds recently announced a spike in the number of Americans using food stamps, at least some of those 45.8 million people didn’t exist. A Brooklyn woman who worked for NYC’s Human Resources Administration has entered a guilty plea to charges of creating fake identities to scam the government out of millions in food stamp benefits.

Over the course of four years, and with the assistance of three pals, the city employee used fake names and Social Security numbers to create a world of more than 1,000 non-existent people that nonetheless qualified for food stamps. The EBT cards would be sent to these ghosts’ addresses, collected by actual scammers and then sold to real human beings for a huge profit.

“These convictions are a warning to city employees and others who use the public coffers as if they were a personal ATM: investigators will shut down the corruption and individuals will be held accountable,” Department of Investigation Commissioner Rose Gill Hearn said following the guilty plea.

City worker admits masterminding $7M food-stamp fraud [NY Post]

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