A Florissant, Missouri, woman is set to be sentenced on October 21 after admitting she kept taking a dead relative’s Social Security payments for nearly eight years. Laneka Holmes, 45, pleaded guilty in federal court in St. Louis to theft of government money. She admitted receiving a total of $170,574 that she was not entitled to.
The relative died on May 23, 2017, and the death was never reported to the Social Security Administration. The payments kept landing in a bank account until April 2025.
What Holmes admitted
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Missouri, the relative’s benefits were deposited into an account the two of them held jointly. Holmes took the money from May 2017 through April 2025. Spread over those 96 months, the total works out to roughly $1,780 a month…