Email Explains How to Get $75K in Benefits for You and Your Girlfriend-Fiction!
Summary of eRumor:
A forwarded email called the “New American Way of Life” explains how to get $75,000 in benefits for you and your girlfriend by legally gaming the Section 8 housing assistance program.
The Truth:
The New American Way of Life email’s claim that there is a “perfectly legal” way to “get $75,000 in benefits for you and your girlfriend” is false.
It’s illegal to receive federal benefits based on false information, and that’s exactly what this email describes.
The email first talks about the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) housing choice voucher program. The program gives low-income families the ability to choose where they live and provides them vouchers to help pay rent.
The email says that a landlord can legally collect housing choice voucher payments for a property that he lives in with a girlfriend so long as he has a different mailing address. That’s not true.
Housing choice vouchers are issued by local housing authorities. The local authority signs a housing assistance payment contract with the landlord, and only people who are named on the lease are allowed to live there, according to the National Housing Law Project.
It is illegal for anyone who isn’t named on a lease to live at one of these properties, including the landlord. The law requires local housing authorities to have policies in place to identify “unauthorized occupancy.”
Those policies vary, but one common example is that a guest can’t stay for more than 14 days in a row, or for more than 20 days in a calendar year.
People who receive housing choice vouchers and have unauthorized residents living in their units could face federal charges. They could also be terminated from the program.