An Albuquerque man is in jail after being caught allegedly committing fraud for a second time. Russell Mays is behind bars, accused of stealing unemployment benefits from his clients as an employee for H&R Block.
Mays used false information to get a job at H&R Block earlier this year, but he came under suspicion when one of his customers noticed her unemployment benefits stopped soon after her tax appointment with Mays. She remembered he had asked for her log-in information for New Mexico Workforce Solutions.
Mays was the only other person who knew her account information and once $1,400 went missing, the client alerted police, who began investigating. Bernalillo County sheriff's office detectives linked her Workforce Solutions account to a Wells Fargo bank account connected to Mays.
“They thought they needed to give this information to the tax prep professional for their taxes,” Det. Weylin Proctor with the BCSO told KRQE. “They were able to take our initial victim’s information and kind of backtrack it to a bank account that was taking her unemployment insurance money.”
Investigators found that another Wells Fargo bank account tied to Mays had collected more than $700 in unemployment funds from another person.
“Once I talked to that victim, they had no idea they even qualified or even had any unemployment insurance benefits,” Proctor said. “Much less had any idea that they were receiving any benefits.”
Mays was able to get a job at H&R Block by using his mother’s Social Security number. That kept his application from being flagged for having a criminal record stemming from a forgery conviction in 2018. Mays, according to BCSO, had falsified documents to claim he was the victim of identity theft when he fact he had been indicted for the same charge.
Detectives say white-collar crimes during the pandemic are difficult to investigate because the courts are backlogged with warrants due to COVID-19. Proctor says it took several months to get the necessary bank statements and hiring documents needed to arrest Mays. “Had to do another warrant to Wells Fargo and that warrant didn’t come back until early November,” Proctor said. “It took months for me to start getting all the different documents together from the legal process. It takes a long time for these white-collar cases to come to a head, just because it takes so much time to get records.”
