Photo: Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times via Getty
A Tennessee musician has been sentenced to 77 months in prison after stealing over $700,000 inCOVID-19unemployment benefits and allegedly bragging about it in a music video.
Prosecutors said that Baines used other people’s names or stolen identities to collect the unemployment benefits, only to later discuss it in a music video uploaded to YouTube.
Baines' fraud lasted from July to September 2020, per prosecutors. During that time, he filed 92 fraudulent PUA claims with EDD. “The applications for these benefits listed addresses in Beverly Hills and Koreatown to which Baines had access, a release from theU.S. Attorney’s Officefor central California reads. “As a result, Baines was able to take possession of and use the debit cards that EDD pre-loaded with the unemployment benefits obtained through the fraudulent applications.”
“Every day that I think about what I did I regret my actions and the impact my crime had on others,” Baines later wrote in a letter to the judge, perNBC News.
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Among Baines' unemployment fraud was one instance of him taking up the identity of a Missouri man who attended school in California, when he “used a debit card issued based on the fraudulent PUA claim filed in the Missouri man’s name to withdraw approximately $2,500,” per authorities.
Back in May, Austin St. John (real name Jason Lawrence Geiger) who played the Red Power Ranger Jason Lee Scott inMighty Morphin Power Rangers, was arrested after an FBI raid at his home in McKinney, Texas for alleged COVID-related wire fraud.
At the time, a federal indictment alleged that 18 people — including St. John — attempted to defraud the Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program while the program was used to provide relief to struggling businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns that began in 2020.
source: people.com
