A Loxahatchee woman is facing charges after fraudulently collecting roughly $377,000 in food stamps, housing assistance, and Medicaid.
The woman had been pulling off the scam since 2003, using two separate social security numbers and a dozen aliases.
Since then, she'd been collecting monthly assistance checks and living large on a one-acre property and claiming she was poverty-stricken.
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Gloria Valle-Clas is facing the maximum sentence allowed by the feds of 51 months in prison, according to the Palm Beach Post.
According to court documents, Valle-Clas was able to persuade the Broward County Housing Authority to give her monthly government checks so she could maintain her two homes in North Lauderdale in 2013. Soon after that, she hit up the Boca Raton Housing Authority with the same scam, persuading them to give her checks for her Loxahatchee home.
She was able to pull off the scams mainly by lying about her marital status, bank accounts, and business ownership. She claimed to own a printing company that apparently never existed.
With that, she was able to dip into government programs that are supposed to help poor and disabled people live in affordable housing. She and her husband were able to bamboozle the government into getting assistance for both the tenant and the landlord in their multiple homes.
During a hearing on Thursday, federal prosecutor Carolyn Bell showed U.S. District Judge Kenneth Ryskamp two different driver's licenses belonging to Valle-Clas as evidence of her multiple identities.
One license showed a photo of Valle-Clas wearing glasses with the name Gloria Lopez-Clas. The other shows Valle-Clas looking different, with the name Nereida Valle on the license.
Valle-Clas was able to pull it all off with a simple plan: dual social security numbers.
With two different social security numbers, she was able to use one to "prove" she was broke and get assistance and the other to "prove" she had good credit to get credit from banks, according to the report.
Valle-Clas was able to turn that good credit into a $136,000 loan for her sizable Loxahatchee home. According to documents, she claimed on her mortgage application to be earning $4,800 a month.
With her poverty identity, she was able to get food stamps and cash handouts.
Valle-Clas' husband, Alexander Gonzalez, who was able to live off of her schemes but played a small roll in pulling it off, was sentenced to 364 days in prison and ordered to repay the government $9,999.
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