Dajuan Hassan, a 36-year-old Los Angeles man, is expected to plead guilty Wednesday to one federal count of mail fraud, admitting he stole the personal information of fellow inmates while locked up in a California state prison and funneled it to an outside accomplice who used it to seek more than $235,000 in taxpayer-funded unemployment benefits.
According to mynewsla.com, Hassan is accused of participating in a scheme to steal both prison inmates’ and identity-theft victims’ personal information between July 2020 and January 2021. His co-defendant, 36-year-old South Los Angeles resident Prentiss Westbrook, was already sentenced in June to three years in federal prison and two years of probation for his role in the conspiracy.
How the Scheme Worked From Behind Bars
Federal investigators say Hassan harvested names, dates of birth and Social Security numbers belonging to fellow inmates and passed that data to Westbrook using the state prison phone system, according to the U.S. Department of Labor OIG. Westbrook then arranged for EDD-issued debit cards to be mailed to addresses under his control in Gardena, and he and others withdrew cash from ATMs throughout the region, investigators say.
Westbrook and his associates filed fraudulent claims with the Employment Development Department in the names of inmates and identity-theft victims, falsely representing that the claimants had recently lost jobs at California businesses or could not find work because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, the program targeted by the scheme, was created by Congress in 2020 in response to the pandemic and administered by the EDD.
Evidence Seized at a Gardena Apartment
In April 2021, federal agents executed a search warrant at Westbrook’s Gardena apartment after fraudulent EDD debit cards were traced to addresses he controlled, records show. Agents seized a California DMV letter addressed to Westbrook, multiple EDD letters, and an EDD letter mailed in the name of an identity-theft victim…