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Tufts Health Plan worker gets three months in prison for role in ID theft and government-payment scam

A Tufts Health Plan member-services clerk who handed over information on several thousand plan members so her brother and a pal of his could defraud Social Security and the IRS was sentenced yesterday to three months in federal prison, followed by nine months of home confinement, the US Attorney's office reports.

Emeline Lubin, 30, actually pleaded guilty in 2014 to a charge of unlawful disclosure of Social Security numbers, but her sentencing was postponed until after she could testify in the trial of a co-worker in the case. That person, Lynrolte Honore, went to trial last fall. A jury convicted her in April; she now awaits her own sentencing in July.

According to prosecutors, Lubin and Honore, who worked in Tufts's Watertown office, forwarded the names, addresses and social-security numbers of 8,800 plan members, mostly over 65, to Marvin Lubin and Sniders Jean-Jacques, a Florida man.

Those two set up dummy bank accounts and used the social-security numbers to gain Social-Security payments - and to file fake tax returns and claim refunds. They then deposited the money in the accounts and withdrew it in increments of less than $10,000 at a time - to avoid triggering mandatory notification to the government. They managed to earn $117,000 in bogus tax refunds and $11,000 in fraudulent Social Security payments before they were arrested in 2014.

Jean-Jacques was sentenced to two years in prison in December, 2014 - two months after Marvin Lubin was sentenced to one year and one day in prison.

In a memorandum to the judge in her case, Emeline Lubin's attorney asked for leniency because she had no prior record and because she allegedly played only a minor role in the scheme:

Nothing in Emeline Lubin’s history or personal characteristics indicate she would have gotten involved in this or any fraudulent scheme had her own brother not personally recruited her. Emeline had steady employment and benefits with Tufts Health Plan, a reliable and reputable corporate employer. Marvin Lubin and Sniders Jean-Jacques were the organizers, leaders, managers, and supervisors of this offense. Admittedly, Emeline’s role allowed the men to access the Tufts’ members’ personal information, but it was nonetheless just one role in a larger scheme. That scheme was not her idea, she had no part in its formulation or planning, and there was no evidence she was involved for the money. In fact, there is no evidence she received any money at all.

In addition to prison and home-confinement time, Emeline Lubin also has to pay roughly $52,000 in restitution.

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Comments

These are the true crimes that affect all of us on a regular basis. I understand you can't sentence someone to 10 years in a federal prison, but 3 months seem a little light. When your identity is stolen like this it is sold and resold - IRS and SS is the immediate scam, but credit cards, bogus unemployment claims and lines of credit soon follow when someone's identity is sold.

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Good Grief: How do I find out if I am one of the members who had their SS# and information stolen? This is especially scary to me as it seems that it was easy for a previously law abiding employee to hack the system and steal our identity.

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