BURLINGTON — A federal magistrate judge issued an arrest warrant Wednesday afternoon for a Brattleboro woman who officials say unlawfully collected more than $328,000 in Social Security benefits earmarked for her mother.
Ella Mae Woods, 73, of Brattleboro, is named in a two-count indictment that maintains she developed a scheme to defraud the Social Security Administration and to have her dead mother's benefits wired from the U.S. Treasury to a TD Bank account in Vermont.
The scheme ran between January 1994 and March 2020, the U.S. Attorney's Office said.
The mother, Jeannette Styles, lived in Brattleboro until she died Jan. 2, 1994, record show.
Woods was scheduled to appear in U.S. District Court in Burlington for arraignment, but the judicial summons was never served by the U.S. Marshals Service, records show.
Woods also has been living in Waterloo, Iowa, according to court records. A deputy marshal in Iowa reported the management at the hotel where Woods had been staying indicated she had moved out about six months ago.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Gregory Waples petitioned the court for the arrest warrant Wednesday afternoon. He noted the summons had been returned unexecuted because Woods had moved from her last known address and her present whereabouts are unknown.
Magistrate Judge Kevin J. Doyle agreed with the request and signed the warrant.
The U.S. Marshals Service will add her name to the National Crime Information Center computer so that if Woods has contact with any law enforcement agency she can be arrested.
At the time of her death, Styles was receiving $679 in monthly benefits from SSA, the indictment said. Those benefits should have ended when Styles died.
The SSA "did not learn of Jeannette Styles' death until recently and, through June 2022, continued to make monthly benefit payments to Styles," the indictment said.
The benefits increased annually and had increased to $1,280 a month by 2022. The payments after her death reached more than $328,000 and Woods used the money for her own benefit, the indictment noted.