CHARLESTON, W.Va. (WCHS) — A Florida woman who admitted to receiving fraudulent West Virginia public employee pension benefits has been sentenced, prosecutors said.
Semiha Nilgun Gencsoy, 71, of Fort Lauderdale, was sentenced to five years of federal probation and ordered to pay nearly $330,000 in restitution for possession of stolen money, according to a press release from the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of West Virginia.
Gencsoy pleaded guilty in May, admitting she fraudulently received $328,478.38 in West Virginia public employee pension benefits over a 15-year period.
Court documents stated that Gencsoy’s father was a mechanical engineering professor at West Virginia University, for which he began receiving West Virginia public employee pension benefits.
After Gencsoy’s father died in 2007, her mother began receiving survivor benefits from the West Virginia Consolidated Public Retirement Board as his widow. The payments were deposited into an account shared by Gencsoy and her mother.
After her mother died in April 2008, Gencsoy was appointed to administer her estate and her mother’s benefits were set to expire. Prosecutors said Gencsoy admitted that she knew her father’s benefits expired, but never notified the WVCPRB of her mother’s death, nor closed the joint bank account.
In the 15 years following Gencsoy’s mother’s death, the joint bank account received over 180 monthly survivor’s benefit pension payments totaling nearly $330,000, which Gencsoy routinely transferred to a personal bank account for her own expenses.