A California woman serving a life prison sentence for murder led a scheme to collect at least $2 million in unemployment benefits using stolen identities, including those of other incarcerated people, federal prosecutors said, the New York Times reported. The woman, Natalie Le DeMola, was one of 13 people charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bank fraud by collecting unemployment benefits using the personal information of people who were ineligible for the aid, the U.S. attorney’s office in the Central District of California announced on Tuesday. An unnamed prison official provided some of this personal information, such as birth dates and Social Security numbers, by collecting it from California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation databases, prosecutors said. According to a 39-count indictment, members of the ring filed hundreds of unemployment applications online between June 2020 and April 2021 using the personal information of people, including themselves, who were not eligible for benefits because they were incarcerated, retired or working. Prosecutors said the applications were mostly for pandemic unemployment benefits expanded to help people who had lost work because of the coronavirus pandemic.
