A Nashville man was sentenced to four years in prison plus three years of supervised release for his role in a scheme to fraudulently obtain emergency rental assistance designated for households impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic.
According to the charges brought against him, Joe Lewis Jefferson recruited collaborators to falsely pose as landlords for properties in Eastern North Carolina. Using the names of the fake landlords, Jefferson prepared and submitted fraudulent loan applications for emergency rental assistance to the North Carolina Housing Opportunities and Prevention of Evictions (NC HOPE) program. After the applications were approved, NC HOPE mailed checks to addresses of Jefferson’s phone landlords.
Jefferson traveled with the nominee landlords to area banks to negotiate the checks and split the proceeds. Jefferson and his co-conspirators submitted at least 44 fraudulent applications for rental assistance, harvesting approximately $279,000.
Jefferson pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and one count of failure to file a tax return last August. As part of the judgment, Jefferson was also ordered to pay $323,824 in criminal restitution to the US Department of Treasury.
