Laura Oglesby, 48, used daughter's identity to seduce young men, procure student loan
A 48-year-old mom from Missouri has pleaded guilty to fraud and is facing five years in jail without parole. Laura Oglesby admitted to stealing her daughter Lauren Hays' identity using which she embezzled thousands of dollars from the government in the form of student loans. Oglesby lived in the small town of Mountain View where she dated men who were convinced by her story that she was a 22-year-old student who worked a job at the city library. She continued to live under her daughter's identity after the two lost contact and began living in different cities.
Of cases involving identity-stealing, Minnesotan grandmother Lois Reiss was accused of fatally shooting her husband David in their home in March 2018. A month later Reiss traveled to Florida and befriended a woman named Pamela Hutchinson and killed her the same way she murdered David. Investigators said Reiss looked eerily similar to Hutchinson and it is believed that she had been intending to steal her identity all along. Reiss was arrested after being spotted at a bar in Texas, extradited to Florida, and was later incarcerated for life in Minnesota. Read full details of her crime here. Serial conman Derek Alldred charmed 27 women and later conned them out of $2.1 million. He pleaded guilty to two counts of identity theft and one count of mail fraud after which he was sentenced to 24 years in jail in 2018.
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Oglesby scammed govt. with a Social Security card under Hays' name
It all started in 2016 when Laura Oglesby applied for and quickly procured a Social Security card in Hays' name. The Arkansas-born fraudster was 43 at the time but completely adopted her daughter's personality. She pretended to be 22, said her name was Lauren Hays, and even pursued romantic relationships with men oblivious to the fact that she was some two decades older than them. “Everyone believed it. She even had boyfriends that believed that she was that age: 22 years old,” Chief Jamie Perkins of the Mountain View Police Department told New York Times, according to a report.
Oglesby used Snapchat to post photos layered with youthful filters while pretending to be Hays. “She had completely adopted a younger lifestyle: clothing, makeup, and personality. She had completely assumed becoming a younger person in her early 20s,” Detective Stetson Schwien, told the local ABC outlet. The scam fell apart two years after she began living with a local couple Avery and Wendy Parker in Mountain view. The kind couple allowed her to live with them after she claimed to have escaped from an abusive partner. During this time she enrolled in Southwest Baptist University, acquired a driver's license under Lauren Hays' name, and applied for student loans. She received $9,400 in federal student loans, $5,920 in Pell Grants, and $1,863 in finance charges. A Daily Mail report states she embezzled $25,000 in total under her daughter's identity.
In 2018, Mountain View police were contacted by authorities in Arkansas who believed Oglesby had committed financial fraud under her daughter's name. Oglesby was approached shortly and it's reported that she denied committing the crime initially before breaking down and admitting to the fraud. She pleaded guilty to the charge of Social Security fraud and along with jail time, Oglesby was ordered to pay $17,521 to the University as well as restitution to the original Lauren Hays for identity theft. The latter has not spoken out about the case or their relationship.