City man fleeced feds for $16K in COVID cash
Joshua Lee Best, 38, used disabled brother’s SIN to apply for pandemic-recovery benefits
A Fredericton man applied for - and received - thousands in pandemic-recovery payments from the federal government in 2021 in his severely autistic brother’s name, a court heard last week.
Joshua Lee Best, 38, of George Street, appeared in Fredericton provincial court by video conference from jail Thursday for a sentencing hearing, after previously having pleaded guilty to numerous charges.
The most serious of those crimes, prosecutor Rodney Jordan said, were fraud and impersonation offences in late 2020 and into 2021.
In August 2021, he said, a caregiver at a Saint John group home contacted the Saint John Police Force to report that someone had used the social-insurance number (SIN) of one of the disabled clients of the facility without authorization.