New Jersey Woman Sentenced for Conspiring to Steal Government Property

ALBANY, NEW YORK – Pamela Febo, age 38, of Keansburg, New Jersey, was sentenced today to three years of probation for fraudulently applying for unemployment benefits on behalf of a state prisoner.

United States Attorney Carla B. Freedman; Janeen DiGuiseppi, Special Agent in Charge of the Albany Field Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI); Anthony J. Annucci, Acting Commissioner of the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (NYSDOCCS); and New York State Department of Labor (NYSDOL) Commissioner Roberta Reardon made the announcement.

Febo agreed with her boyfriend, Irvis Jorge, to submit a fraudulent unemployment insurance claim to NYSDOL using Jorge’s personal identifying information, at a time when Jorge was an inmate in NYSDOCCS custody.  Febo submitted the application in October 2020 and continued to re-certify Jorge’s benefits eligibility each week for approximately four months.  Each weekly certification Febo submitted indicated that Jorge was “able and available to start work immediately” even though she knew Jorge remained incarcerated and could not work.  NYSDOL paid the defendants $27,348 based on the repeated false certifications. 

Senior United States District Judge Gary L. Sharpe also ordered restitution in the amount of $27,348 and forfeiture in the amount of $12,444.  In December, Judge Sharpe sentenced Jorge to 364 days in jail, to run consecutively to the state term of imprisonment he was serving at the time of this offense. 

The FBI, the NYSDOCCS Office of Special Investigations, and the NYSDOL Office of Special Investigations conducted the investigation.  Assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathan S. Reiner prosecuted the case.

On May 17, 2021, the Attorney General established the COVID-19 Fraud Enforcement Task Force to marshal the resources of the Department of Justice in partnership with agencies across government to enhance efforts to combat and prevent pandemic-related fraud. The Task Force bolsters efforts to investigate and prosecute the most culpable domestic and international criminal actors and assists agencies tasked with administering relief programs to prevent fraud by, among other methods, augmenting and incorporating existing coordination mechanisms, identifying resources and techniques to uncover fraudulent actors and their schemes, and sharing and harnessing information and insights gained from prior enforcement efforts.

For more information on the Department’s response to the pandemic, please visit https://www.justice.gov/coronavirus.  Anyone with information about allegations of attempted fraud involving COVID-19 can report it by calling the Department of Justice’s National Center for Disaster Fraud (NCDF) Hotline at 866-720-5721 or via the NCDF Web Complaint Form at: https://www.justice.gov/disaster-fraud/ncdf-disaster-complaint-form.