Litter pickup duty is recognized as a choice job for minimum- and medium-security inmates. It sure beats cleaning bathrooms and gives a chance to get a rare break outside prison walls. Coveted as it may be, not every prisoner who gets litter pick up duty deserves it. In 1994, Steven Craig Johnson was serving a state prison sentence for three counts of sex abuse and one count of attempted sodomy. One day in 1994, Johnson got litter pickup duty. But instead of cleaning up the roadsides, he disappeared.
Johnson was able to disappear, for thirty years, by stealing the identity of a child who died in Texas in January of 1962. Johnson obtained a copy of the child’s birth certificate and was eventually able to get a Social Security number in Texas in 1995 and a Georgia driver’s license three years later in 1998. Not else a thief needs to live like someone else for a very long time. But not for a lifetime. Johnson was found on July 18, 2024, at an apartment complex in Macon, Georgia, under the name of William Cox.
Johnson has been charged with stolen identity theft. With the possibility of more! There are fraud opportunities galore for a seventy-year-old with a stolen identity. Medicare, Medicaid, Income Tax, Social Security…as far as a fraudster can see.
Shoutout to the Oregon Corrections Department for initiating help from the U.S. Marshals in the search for Johnson. New technology used by the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service helped uncover this case.
Today’s Fraud of The Day is based on article “’Most wanted’ Oregon fugitive arrested in Georgia after 30 years” published by the Salem Statesman Journal on July 18, 2024.
Steven Craig Johnson, 70, was arrested by a regional fugitive task force of the U.S. Marshals Service at about 2 p.m. at an apartment complex where he had been living under the alias of William Cox since 2011, according to a news release.
Johnson, who the Oregon Department of Corrections classified as one of its “most wanted fugitives,” fled from a prison work group in 1994. He was serving a prison sentence at the Mill Creek Correctional Facility in Salem for sexual abuse and attempted sodomy. A 2019 wanted poster from the ODOC described Johnson as a “pedophile” who “presents a high probability of victimizing pre-teen boys.” It also cautioned that he “should not be allowed contact with children.”
