A mother from Missouri has pleaded guilty to fraud after she spent two years pretending to be her estranged 22-year-old daughter, the Independent reports.
In 2016, Laura Oglesby, 48, stole her daughter Lauren Ashleigh Hays' identity after applying for a Social Security card in her name in order to enroll in college in the small town of Mountain View.
After she received the fraudulent Social Security card, Oglesby used the card to get a Missouri driver's license, according to the US Attorney's Office for the Western District of Missouri.
The following year, Oglesby used the Social Security card once more to enroll at Southwest Baptist University in Missouri, for which she successfully applied for financial aid.
She was handed $9,400 in federal student loans, $5,920 in Pell Grants, $337 for books she purchased from the university bookstore, and $1,863 in finance charges.
Oglesby used to live with her daughter in Jonesboro, Arkansas before she moved to Missouri after the pair fell out of contact.
Those at the university truly believed Oglesby was a 22-year-old student named Lauren Hays who pursued sexual relationships with men who thought she was in her early twenties and was employed at the city library.
But the reality was that she was a mother in her forties who had simply been impersonating her estranged daughter and had even embezzled over $25,000 in funds.
The mom now faces up to five years in prison without parole for Social Security fraud.
"Everyone believed it," Chief Jamie Perkins of the Mountain View Police Department told The New York Times. "She even had boyfriends that believed that she was that age: 22 years old."
Southwest Baptist University has since said in a statement that it had "cooperated fully with the investigation."
The college did not reveal whether or not Oglesby attended classes at the college, located approximately 135 miles northeast of Mountain View.
After she pleaded guilty to the charge of Social Security fraud, Oglesby was handed a $17,521 fine payable to the university in addition to restitution to her daughter for identity theft.
Oglesby also faces a sentence of up to five years in federal prison without parole.
