BURLINGTON — A federal grand jury has indicted the daughter of a Brattleboro woman who died in 1994 on charges she continued to unlawfully collect 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 to a TD Bank in Vermont from the U.S. Treasury.
The scheme ran between January 1994 and March 2020, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.
The second felony count lists 30 specific monthly payments ranging from $1,012 to $1,049 received between September 2017 and continuing through March 2020, the indictment notes.
Her mother, Jeannette Styles, lived in Brattleboro until she died Jan. 2, 1994, the indictment said. At the time of her death, Styles was receiving $679 in monthly Social Security benefits, the indictment said. Those benefits should have ended when Styles died.
The indictment noted 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, indictment noted.
Attempts by the Reformer to reach Woods were unsuccessful.
Woods is scheduled for arraignment on Oct. 19 in U.S. District Court in Burlington before federal Magistrate Kevin Doyle.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Gregory L. Waples, who handles many of the major fraud cases in the prosecutor’s office, obtained the federal indictment in Burlington last Thursday.
Woods took several steps to steal and convert to her own use the Social Security benefits improperly paid after her mother’s death, court records show. Among the acts taken was Woods created a joint account with her mother at the TD Bank in Brattleboro in 2002, eight years after her mother died, the indictment said.
It noted Woods forged the signature of her mother on the bank signature card and proceeded to have the monthly Social Security benefit checks deposited into the account “and used those funds for her own benefit and enjoyment.”
Starting in October 2007 and continuing through March 2020, the Social Security Administration deposited Styles monthly payment into the TD Bank account through the Automated Clearing House, an electronic transaction from the U.S. Treasury, court records show.
Starting in March 2020, Woods opened an account in the name of Jeannette Styles through the Comerica Bank and at the same time created an account at the bank in her name. The mailing address for Styles and Woods was the same U.S. Post Office box in Brattleboro, the indictment said.
Between April 2020 and June 2020, the federal agency deposited more than $26,000 into the Styles account at Comerica Bank, court records note. The indictment said Woods used some of those fraudulently obtained funds for herself.