On September 20, 2017, Hurricane Maria made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane in Puerto Rico. As a result, U.S. officials issued a major disaster declaration, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) issued a solicitation seeking vendors that could provide 40,000,000 self-heating meals per week to the island. Emergency situations can cause chaos…chaos that fraudsters thrive in.
Tiffany Brown submitted a proposal to FEMA stating that her Georgia-based company, Tribute Contracting LLC (“Tribute”), could provide the necessary self-heating meals in the time frame that FEMA needed. She claimed that Tribute could deliver one million self-heating meals per day utilizing 210 trucks that she supposedly had at her disposal, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Based on her proposal, FEMA awarded Brown a $155,982,000 contract that required Brown to start with a delivery of one million meals on October 7, 2017. ASAP.
Turns out that Tribute not only did not have the ability to meet the FEMA’s mandates, but Brown also wasn’t even working to try to make Tribute able to meet those FEMA mandates. As of October 7, 2017, Brown had neither secured any suppliers to provide the self-heating meals nor arranged with any shippers or logistics agencies to deliver those meals. Although Brown had procured 50,000 meals from a small Georgia vendor, those meals were not self-heating. This didn’t stop Brown from requesting payment for services that she had not provided. On October 19, 2017, FEMA terminated its contract with Brown and Tribute. But Brown continued sending fraudulent invoices to FEMA not only for services never provided, but expenses she purportedly incurred while trying to fulfill the contract.
On January 17, 2025, Brown was found guilty of 32 associated charges of fraud, theft and money laundering. Her sentencing is scheduled for April 2025.
Great job by the Department of Homeland Security in this case.
Today’s Fraud of The Day is based on article “Atlanta business owner guilty of fraud, theft in $156M FEMA fraud case” published by the Atlanta-Journal Constitution on January 17, 2025.
It took a jury just over three hours Friday to find Atlanta business owner Tiffany Brown guilty on charges accusing her of two scams in which prosecutors said she made up lawyers, a business settlement and more in connection with landing a government contract in the wake of Hurricane Maria.
The jury found Brown guilty on 32 counts of fraud, theft and money laundering in association with a $156 million Federal Emergency Management Agency contract. Brown sat motionless as the verdict was read aloud in Atlanta’s federal trial court.
