A Mexican citizen with more than 40 aliases who admitted to stealing more than $350,000 in government benefits was sentenced Friday to 37 months in federal prison, equaling one month of custody for every year he lived in the U.S. with a stolen identity.

Federal prosecutors say Tijuana resident Andres Avelino Anduaga, 66, obtained a U.S. citizen’s birth certificate in 1980 — about 12 years after he first came to the country to work — and then used that identification to obtain a social security number and California driver’s license.

With those documents, Anduaga was able to fraudulently obtain government benefits from federal, state and local agencies, including nearly $250,000 in illicit Social Security benefits and more than $100,000 in MediCal health benefits, Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey D. Hill said.

“What this guy was doing was ridiculous,” Hill told the Union-Tribune in a phone interview after Friday’s sentencing.


But according to a sentencing memorandum filed by defense attorney Ellis Johnston III, the decades-long theft was not malicious, nor was it well-planned.

“Thirty years ago this month, Andres Anduaga fell out of a second-story motel balcony, ending up in a coma for over a month,” Johnston wrote. “Upon recovery, he applied for disability benefits under an identity he had assumed.”

Disabled and unable to work, Anduaga has since “lived a subsistence life on his disability payments and maintained minimal health care through MediCal,” Johnston wrote. “Upon his arrest, Anduaga accepted responsibility for his actions and continues to do so today.”

According to Johnston, Anduaga’s father was killed when he was a child, and he came to the U.S. illegally as a teen in 1968 seeking better opportunities than the ones available in his native Chihuahua, Mexico. While working as a seasonal farm worker in 1980, he bought a birth certificate that allowed him to obtain the Social Security number and driver’s license.


It wasn’t until he was permanently disabled in the balcony accident that Anduaga began bilking government benefits, Johnston wrote.

Anduaga admitted in his plea that despite being deported twice — in 1994 and 2000 — he was able to return and travel freely between the United States and Mexico using a U.S. passport he obtained via the stolen identity.

U.S. District Judge John Houston sentenced Anduaga to three years and one month in prison for theft of public property and being in the U.S. illegally.

“This is one of the longest frauds, and one of the highest-dollar losses, if not the highest, that I’ve ever seen,” said Hill, who investigates and prosecutes Social Security fraud in San Diego and Imperial counties. “It’s also the longest custodial sentence (for Social Security fraud) at least since I arrived in 2014.”


The case against Anduaga was a tricky one, Hill said, and prosecutors are still not sure if Anduaga is even the defendant’s true name, or if he’s 66 years old, as he claims.

“He had at least 40 different (aliases),” Hill said.

What prosecutors were able to determine was that Anduaga had previously committed four felonies and 17 misdemeanors — all for non-violent offenses — since 1973. Three of the felony offenses were committed after 1980, when he assumed the stolen identity.

Initially, investigators believed Anduaga was a legitimate U.S. citizen whose only offense was improperly receiving government aid while living in Tijuana.


“That’s very endemic when you have high rent on one side of the border, cheap rent on the other side,” Hill said.

The case took a turn when a second person in Oceanside tried to commit identity theft against the same man whose identity Anduaga had assumed in 1980. That led investigators to dive deeper into Anduaga’s past, where they discovered his prior convictions, his previous deportations and his prolific, nearly four-decade-long scam.

“He cost taxpayers lots of money,” Hill said. “And those funds were stolen from the most needy.”

City News Service contributed to this report.


Twitter: @Alex_Riggins

(619) 293-1710


alex.riggins@sduniontribune.com

UPDATES:

5:05 p.m.: This article was updated with additional details.

This article was originally published at 10:20 a.m. on July 14, 2018.