[smnrchrds]

The article explains that the dollar amount was a huge exaggeration ($150,000 per year claimed by politicians, versus $40,000 in total over many years in reality).

But more importantly, the myth is that she was not just a criminal, but one of many thousands or hundreds of thousands of people defrauding and abusing the welfare system. It's like when one immigrant ends up in the news for committing a crime, then some groups call for a total ban on immigration.

[rjf72]

This [1] is likely the source for the entirety of research that was done for this article. It's a voluminous article on the lady with extensive citations, sources, and information. Suffice to say she stole way over $40k, and way over $150k for that matter. She was a complete psychopath with 'ties' to crimes up to and including murderous insurance fraud. For instance in one case one of her husbands would end up getting killed by another man. A month after his death she took the insurance money and moved and bought a new house, with her new companion - the man who killed her husband. Nobody would be found guilty of any crime in that instance.

And something that this article leaves out is that her case and conviction set off a wave of further prosecutions. In the first year following her welfare fraud conviction, an additional 241 people were indicted on the same. And this was at a time with a much smaller population and an even smaller chunk of it on social programs. It sparked a crackdown on what seems to have been relatively lax enforcement beforehand.

And the $150k figure did not come from politicians. It came from investigative journalism and journalists who reported on her fascinating and sordid tale. The real article mentions that the Chicago Tribune was the first source for the $150k. It also reported on her jewelry, furs, Cadillac, etc - which were also all real. I hate the word because it's become so loaded, but this article probably qualifies for the title "fake news." In that it takes real and falsifiable facts and presents them in an intentionally distorted manner to try to push forward an agenda that is very likely to mislead and misinform the reader.

[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20190427164817/http://www.slate....