Free Republic

Social Security beneficiaries snared in the largest disability scam in U.S. history won a reprieve last week when the government said it will put off decisions on revoking their benefits until the new year. The reversal by the Social Security Administration comes after the federal government finally took possession of and named receivers for thousands of case files from Eric C. Conn, the lawyer who orchestrated the disability-fraud ring. The files, which had been sitting in Conn’s law office for years, contain evidence that might help the beneficiaries prove they were entitled to benefits the government is now trying to...

Federal agents spent months tracking down Conn, who cut off his electronic monitor and fled in June. Conn pleaded guilty in March to stealing from the federal government and bribing a judge in a more than $500 million Social Security fraud case.

A prominent Kentucky disability attorney at the center of a more than $500 million Social Security fraud case, who became the subject of a massive manhunt after he vanished months ago, has been captured in Honduras, officials announced Monday. Eric Conn was captured by a SWAT team as he came out of a restaurant in the coastal city of La Ceiba, the Honduras public magistrate’s office said in a news release . The office added that the arrest was “the product of arduous intelligence, surveillance and tailing by the agents.” U.S. federal agents spent months tracking Conn, who cut off...

The Social Security judge who rubber-stamped more than 1,700 bogus disability applications as part of the largest disability fraud ring in American history was sentenced to four years in federal prison Friday. David B. Daugherty left the Kentucky courtroom in handcuffs after Judge Danny C. Reeves rejected the government’s recommendation of a year in home confinement, and instead gave him the maximum time allowed on the charges he pled guilty to. The judge also ordered Daugherty to pay $93 million in restitution to the government, according to witnesses in the courtroom. Daugherty was part of the disability fraud ring orchestrated...

A ringleader in one of the biggest Social Security disability fraud cases in U.S. history has pleaded guilty to filing more than 1,700 bogus applications, bilking the government out of potentially a half-billion dollars. But the administration is struggling to figure out how to handle the applicants, many of whom say that even though their applications were falsified, their cases are real and they shouldn’t be punished for having been ensnared by the massive fraud. Eric C. Conn, a prominent lawyer in eastern Kentucky, signed a guilty plea late last month acknowledging the scam, in which he recruited and filed...