From an article on food stamp fraud:
Vida Ofori Causey, 45, was charged in an Information with one count of conspiracy to commit SNAP benefits fraud, one count of SNAP fraud, and one count of money laundering in connection with a four year fraud scheme.
The Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as the Food Stamp Program, administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), provides eligible households with government subsidies for certain foodstuffs, and allows holders to exchange their SNAP benefits for food at authorized retail food stores…
From April 2010 to October 2014, Causey conspired with others to commit SNAP fraud by purchasing SNAP benefits from recipients rather than exchanging them for food. Causey purchased the benefits at a discounted value of approximately fifty cents for every SNAP dollar. By so doing, Causey caused the USDA to electronically deposit into a bank account controlled by her the full face value of the SNAP benefits fraudulently obtained.
During the course of the conspiracy, Causey defrauded the USDA of approximately $3,638,900 in SNAP funds.
Keep in mind, this is just one woman. Food stamp fraud takes place all day, every single day, in all fifty states. According to a 2014 GAO report, SNAP fraud is already rampant and it’s accelerating as the size of the program grows. Last summer, one prosecution saw a group of 54 defendants charged with almost $18 Million in theft – in just one state.
This is another hallmark of r-selection. When in a true resource glut, often those who thrive will do so through socially maneuvering more than honest demonstrations of skill, or through outright breaking of the rules and disregarding of group-morality. In r-selection the individuals who thrive are the moral-less individuals who would never be accepted by a K-strategist group if resources were limited, and who would thus be killed immediately in K-selection. Meanwhile those who are innately moral and technically competent simply scrape by. To a K-strategist, r-selection is a daily, irritating, violation of expectation. Bad wins, and good suffers.
It is a good example of how living in an environment which is not congruent with an individual’s r or K-status can create a constant frustration which motivates the individual to try and change the environment around them to mirror their reproductive strategy. That is politics. K’s will try to use government to stamp out corruption and create a world which only rewards honest ability, effort, and determination, while r’s will favor an environment where resources are provided freely, and where the system allows them to game it to provide limitless resources to them. To this r-strategist in the article, the injustice is that people stuck their nose into her scam, and brought her free resources boom to an end.
You can see how societal degeneration occurs when resources are abundant and the moral-less r-strategists are rewarded unduly, as well as how a sudden restriction of resources (even to the point some will die) can promote the type of aggressive culling that would favor a society of greatness and morality.
Apocalypse cometh™
She should have kept the fiction that goes in on Appalachia, and she would have been fine. Coca-cola is the currency for fraud there. You buy X cases of Coca-cola with your food stamps in one convenience store, walk across the street with them, and sell them to that convenience for for $.50 on the dollar. He puts them back on the shelves, for the next guy who comes in, buys them with food stamps, and then walks them back across the street to sell them for $.50 on the dollar…
Part of why I think that this scheme has been allowed to get so prevalent is that the individual state has no incentive to stop it — they are collecting sales tax on every transaction.
This woman is an immigrant from Ghana. This sort of fraud is rampant at these immigrant-owned convenience stores.
http://www.ghanacelebrities.com/2015/09/30/a-us-based-ghanaian-woman-vida-ofori-causey-pleads-guilty-to-3-6-million-fraud-you-wont-believe-what-she-did/
Using r/k theory to explain criminal behavior: http://drjamesthompson.blogspot.com/2015/10/have-criminologists-tampered-with-crime.html
Very cool.
This is actually pretty easy to solve. In the 1990’s many states began associating fingerprints with their welfare recipients. To get the check you had to give your finger print. If you were found ‘double’ (or multi) dipping, they prosecuted you. Welfare rolls were dropping at the time as employment was picking up, but they had about a 30% drop in NYS.
They only caught .5% of recipients double dipping. At least some of those committing fraud were smart enough to know they’d be caught so they didn’t. I think Texas had the same fraud detection rate. Detractors of the system said “it is only catching .5% not that many people” but advocates pointed out there had been that 30% decline in use overall.