A Washington inmate used jail phones to call VA medical centers and convince staff members to hand over personal information of seriously ill veterans receiving care at the hospitals.
With a second call, the inmate then tried to scam their close relatives out of money.
Repeating the same scam over 60 times, Darryl Lamont Young, 41, took family members of sick veterans for $8,900 between late 2021 and early 2023, a federal jury in Seattle found Monday. The jury convicted Young of 14 counts of aggravated identity theft and wire fraud in the scam after a four-day trial.
An accomplice in the scheme with Young, Aqeelah Ngiesha Williams, 29, was convicted on 12 counts in the scheme.
“While they did not get a huge amount of money with this scheme, the harm they caused to those already suffering a health crisis, is deserving of federal prosecution,” said U.S. Attorney Gorman in a Department of Justice press release on the convictions.
Young began the scam, according to the Justice Department, by using phones in the King County Jail to call Department of Veterans Affairs medical centers, seeking the identities of severely sick patients.
“These calls were free and the local VA medical center did not receive the jail’s announcement that the call was from an inmate,” the DOJ press release said. “Impersonating a VA employee, Young would then ask to be transferred to out-of-state medical facilities. Because the local VA transferred the call, the out-of-state medical center did not know that the call was from an inmate.”
Once connected to the second VA facility, Young claimed to be a VA employee, such as “Jason in bed control” or “Travis” in “patient registration,” the Justice Department said, in order to convince staffers to hand over the identity of a sick patient’s emergency contact, usually a close relative.
“Having served in the military, Young had some understanding of VA hospital operations,” Department of Justice officials said in the release, adding that Williams helped arrange the calls to family members.
Once provided with information on family members, Williams arranged for Young to call those relatives with a rehearsed scam. The two would tell the relatives that the sick patient was entitled to a COVID-related relief payment and ask for financial information to forward the payment.
With the financial information, the two would then steal money from the ill veteran, and deposit the funds in Young’s jail commissary account.