AUGUSTA, Maine (NEWS CENTER) -- The Maine Department of Health and Human Services charged eight people from Cumberland County Monday with benefit fraud after the people involved allegedly stole thousands of dollars in state benefits.
The Fraud Investigation and Recovery Unit of DHHS announced that two of the people charged are brother and sister, Benjamin Roussel and Stephanie Roussel Haider, and that they were involved in a large-scale re-sale enterprise.
FIRU Director of Fraud Operations Tom Roth said the two are charged with receiving stolen items, paying pennies on the dollar for them, then re-selling them on the internet. Roth said Roussel and his sister did not report that increased income to the state when re-applying for SNAP benefits and Social Security benefits.
"When you don't report your income accurately to the department it impacts the benefits and in most cases gives you more benefits than you're entitled to," said Roth. "We're finding that our cases are crossing over more and more into other allegations of crime."
The unit has already reported more than one million dollars in stolen benefits this year over 60 cases that the unit has submitted to the Attorney General's office.
"We're uncovering a lot of cases in a variety of ways," said Roth.
Roth said Roussel allegedly received more than $9,000 dollars in benefits and Roussel Haider more than $13,000.00 in benefits based on the false reporting of their income. Combined with the other six indictments, the total money stolen from the state is more than $89,000.
Roth said investigators are finding more cases.
"We're just being more diligent and we're training our investigators to look in different manners and different ways for the fraud of benefits," said Roth. "We typically find out about it at some point and in many cases, those become criminal investigations."
The Fraud Unit has 17 in 10 regional offices across the state.
Roth said he expects the unit will exceed last year's record number of cases, which was 105.