Beth Beamer had already done her time in prison for stealing government benefit funds when the police showed up again. In 2021, Beamer was sentenced for just over one year for stealing the Social Security benefits of her missing mom. On a still unknown date in the summer of 2017, Beamer’s mom reportedly went missing from her home. Despite her being reported as missing, the Social Security Administration continued paying her benefits and deposited them into a bank account that Beamer had access to. Convenient if you are a fraudster, which Beamer was.
In May of 2020, the benefits were suspended by SSA who were finally seeking a new address for the mom. No one in the SSA office questioned the supposed caller who identified herself as the missing mom on December 21, 2020. They just updated the records with the new address which was Beamer’s address! That phone call caused the SSA to restart paying benefits. In total, Beamer collected almost $70,000 in benefits for her own personal use for four years. In 2021, one year after Beamer admitted to updating her mom’s address to her own, SSA-OIG determined that Beth Beamer was accessing the SSA payments and spending the money on herself.
Not one month after Beamer’s release from prison in April of 2023, Beamer was arrested again. It turns out that not only had Beamer stolen her mother’s Social Security benefits, but she had failed to report her mom’s death in the process. This was more an oversight on Beamer’s part. She went out of her way to hide her mother’s death. Beamer admitted that in August 2017, she dumped the body of her deceased mother down a roadside embankment and into a river in Tryon.
On May 17, 2023, Beamer got the maximum sentence of 19 months for concealing her mother’s death. Nine months more than the sentence she got for stealing from the U.S. taxpayer.
Kudos to the police department in continuing the search for Beth Beamer’s mom.
Today’s Fraud Of The Day is based on article “Woman pleads guilty to concealing mother’s death to collect her Social Security” published by ABC 13 News on May 17, 2023
A Polk County woman accused of throwing her mother’s body into a river has pleaded guilty to concealing her mother’s death.
Beth Beamer pleaded guilty in court on Wednesday, May 17, 2023, after stealing more than $60,000 in cashed Social Security checks and abusing her mother, Rena Hefner Beamer, for years as they lived under the same roof in Mauldin, South Carolina.
