(p. A1) For the past two decades, Liz Birenbaum’s 88-year-old mother, Marge, has received her Social Security check on the second Wednesday of each month. It’s her sole source of income, which pays for her room at a long-term care center, where she landed last October after having a stroke.
When the deposit didn’t arrive in January [2024], they logged into Marge’s Social Security account, where they found some startling clues: the last four digits of a bank account number that didn’t match her own, at a bank they didn’t recognize.
“Someone had gotten in,” said Ms. Birenbaum, of Chappaqua, N.Y. “Then I hit a panic button.”
It quickly became evident that a fraudster had redirected the $2,452 benefit to an unknown Citibank account. Marge, who lives in Minnesota, had never banked there. (Ms. Birenbaum requested to refer to her mother by her first name only to protect her from future fraud.)
Ms. Birenbaum immediately started making calls to set things right. When she finally connected with a Social Security representative from a local office in a Bloomington, Minn., the rep casually mentioned that this happens “all the time.”
“I was stunned,” Ms. Birenbaum said.
. . .
(p. A18) It can be a lucrative fraud, and a devastating benefit to lose. An estimated $33.5 million in benefits — intended for nearly 21,000 beneficiaries — were redirected in a five-year period ending in May 2018, according to the most recent audit from the Office of the Inspector General, an independent group responsible for overseeing investigations and audits at the agency. Another $23.9 million in fraudulent redirects were prevented before they happened over the same time period.
“Fraudsters were able to obtain sufficient information about a true beneficiary to convince the Social Security Administration that they were that beneficiary,” said Jeffrey Brown, a deputy assistant inspector general at the Office of the Inspector General, who analyzed the issue in 2019. “Once they were in the front door, they were able to change their direct deposits.”
. . .
Just months before Marge’s benefits were redirected, the O.I.G. issued a report that said the administration’s portal, called my Social Security, did not fully comply with federal requirements for identity verification: It said it didn’t go far enough to verify and validate new registrants’ identities, in all cases.
. . .
The issue would have been impossible for someone like Marge to rectify on her own. It was challenging enough for Ms. Birenbaum, a marketing consultant, and her brother, based near their mother in a Minneapolis suburb, who worked together to recover the benefits and secure Marge’s account.
Ms. Birenbaum — who reported the crime to the O.I.G. and the F.B.I. and alerted her state and federal representatives — once spent two and a half hours on hold with the Social Security Administration before connecting with a regional case worker. The rep was able to see that her mother’s direct deposit information had been altered in early December, the month before the benefits vanished.
Ms. Birenbaum’s brother visited their mother’s local Social Security office and became Marge’s “representative payee,” which allows him to handle her affairs (Social Security does not accept powers of attorney). They had to find ways to make the correction without bringing Marge to the office, which Ms. Birenbaum said would have been a “herculean task.”
Marge received the missing money on March 1, [2024] about a month and a half after they discovered the problem.
(Note: the online version of the story has the same date as the print version, and has the title “How Fraudsters Break Into Social Security Accounts and Steal Benefits.”)
