48-Year-Old Woman Posed As Her 22-Year-Old Daughter For 2 Years And Even Her Boyfriends Believed It

A 48-year-old Missouri woman has been sentenced to five years in prison without parole after pleading guilty for living as her estranged 22-year-old daughter for two years and embezzling more than $255,000 in social security fraud. Laura Oglesby not only posed as the younger woman on legal documents but also attended university and even had boyfriends who believed she was only in her 20s.

1. In addition to jail time, she’ll be shelling out a load of cash. Not only will she spend five years behind bars, but Oglesby must also repay $17,251 to the Southwest Baptist University and restitution to her daughter, Lauren Ashleigh Hays, for identity theft.
2. Her crime was well-planned and well-executed. Oglesby is said to have obtained a social security card as well as a driver’s license in her daughter’s name back in 2016, when Hays was 22, according to the US Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Missouri. The following year, she enrolled at the university and received financial aid to fund her tuition.
3. She truly committed to her role. While attending university, Oglesby lived the lifestyle of a twentysomething, getting a job at the city library and even young boyfriends who were also students at the school and who believed she was really 22. “Everyone believed it,” Chief Jamie Perkins of the Mountain View Police Department told the New York Times.
4. It was her job at the library that eventually got her caught. Police tracked her down through her employment after Arkansas authorities contacted them in August 2019 saying they were looking for a “Ms. Oglesby” who’d stolen Hay’s identity back in 2016. Soon later, they tracked Oglesby down pretty easily.
5. Oglesby claimed she’d been running from a domestic violence relationship “for years.” However, Perkins isn’t sure about the details of her life outside of the one she’d created since stealing her daughter’s identity. “We don’t know her life story outside of what she told us, but we know what happened here,” he said. While she initially denied she was Laura Oglesby when pulled over by police, she eventually admitted her crimes when she was shown proof of her real identity.