Timothy Gritman, a Pennsylvania resident, posed as his dead father to steal his pension and New York Social Security payments from other states, an FBI investigation triggered by an anonymous tip has revealed.
Gritman, 55, was arrested on February 14 and pleaded guilty to wire and Social Security fraud in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia, New York State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli in a statement. He faces a maximum of 285 years in prison, a period of three years of supervised release and $3.7 million in fines when he is sentenced on May 31.
Gritman Jr. was so determined to continue cashing his dead father’s checks that he even used makeup to “bleach his hair and eyebrows” and impersonate 79-year-old Ralph Gritman to authorities.
In total, he stole $204,985 in New York State Social Security and pension funds from October 2017 to October 2022, State Comptroller DiNapoli said.
The elderly Gritman, a native of Freeport, Long Island, NY, retired from the Nassau County Clerk’s Office in 1992 and moved with his wife Naomi to a retirement community in Pennsylvania approximately three years later. He was widowed in 2010 and moved in with his son in 2014, the comptroller’s office said.
Years later, father and son retired and moved to Wyoming in August 2017, DiNapoli said. The elder Gritman went to a hospital emergency room in that state a month later. That was the last time his Medicare benefits were used, the New York comptroller said.
The father was “in poor health in 2016 when his relatives last saw him alive” at his son’s residence in Pennsylvania, he explained. New York Post.
In 2019 Timothy Gritman told a relative that his father had died several years earlier, but would not say where he was buried or what happened to his body, DiNapoli said.
A call to the New York State Comptroller’s Fraud Hotline sparked an investigation involving the FBI and Pennsylvania authorities and led to the suspension of pension payments on behalf of the elderly Ralph Gritman. But his son continued to claim that his father was alive and requested that child support payments be resumed.
When controllers asked to speak to Ralph Gritman, his son would say the older man was asleep or was trying to imitate his father’s voice, authorities alleged.
Ralph Gritman’s body has yet to be found. He is believed to have died of natural causes at an undisclosed date.
“It goes without saying that defrauding the government is a bad criminal idea and the FBI and our partners will continue to go after anyone bold enough and foolish enough to do so,” said Jacqueline Maguire, Special Agent in Charge of the Division of FBI Philadelphia.
“My office will continue to hold accountable anyone who seeks to defraud the pension system, no matter who they are or where they are,” DiNapoli warned.