A Mom, 48, Pleaded Guilty After Posing As Her Daughter & Dating Guys In College For Years
Police say "everybody" believed that she was 22.
If your partner was secretly a 48-year-old masquerading as a twenty-something, would you be able to spot it?
A Missouri woman has admitted to stealing her daughter's identity and living two years of her life as a college student, during which she worked at a library, dated a few guys and racked up more than $25,000 in debt.
Laura Oglesby, 48, pleaded guilty this week to social security fraud and admitted to the scheme in her plea, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District of Missouri. She faces up to five years in prison and has been ordered to pay $17,521 in restitution to the university that she duped, and to the daughter whose credit she ruined.
Authorities say she admitted to applying for a social security card using her daughter's identity in 2016, and that she used that card to pose as her estranged daughter for years.
She got a driver's licence, enrolled in classes at Southwest Baptist University, took out student loans and ultimately spent two years pretending to be her own daughter, the U.S. Attorney's Office said.
"Everybody believed it," Mountain View Police Chief Jamie Perkins told the New York Times. "She even had boyfriends that believed that she was that age: 22 years old."
She also built a social media presence for herself and was active on Snapchat, according to reports from when the case first broke in 2018.
"She had completely adopted a younger lifestyle: clothing, makeup and personality," Det. Stetson Schwien told broadcaster KSPR in 2018, shortly after her arrest. "She had completely assumed becoming a younger person in her early twenties."
No one realized what was happening until police in Arkansas contacted Mountain View Police in Missouri about an identity fraud case. The Mountain View Police traced the suspect's name to a local library and discovered that she was working there while posing as a student.
Perkins said she claimed to be hiding from a domestic violence situation, although he did not confirm her story.
"She had lived that life for a couple of years and basically just ruined her daughter's credit," Perkins said.
Oglesby has not been sentenced yet.