On February 7, 2022, a Department of Homeland Security employee named Richeline Anisso Fung submitted a timesheet claiming she had worked 33 hours in a single day. She did it again the next day. And the next. And the next. On February 11, she dialed it back to a modest 32 hours — restraint, apparently.
Nobody noticed.
Fung, 46, of Pembroke Pines, Florida, worked as a cybersecurity employee at DHS-CISA from September 2016 to October 2025. But starting in January 2021, she quietly picked up contractor positions at the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Department of Energy, the Federal Highway Administration, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the USDA — billing all of them simultaneously through her own company, RAF Pro-Consulting, LLC. She hid the overlapping gigs from every employer by working remotely from all of them. Total take: $250,000 of your money, as reported by Townhall.
In February 2022 alone, Fung claimed more than 24 hours of work on 15 separate days. Fifteen days in a single month where she supposedly worked longer than the Earth takes to rotate. And every one of those timesheets got approved, processed, and paid.
U.S. Attorney Jeanine Ferris Pirro didn't sugarcoat it. "Richeline Fung stole a quarter-million dollars from the American taxpayer, and today she stands as a convicted felon," Pirro said after Fung pleaded guilty to making false, fictitious, or fraudulent claims in U.S. District Court.
Colin M. McDonald, Assistant Attorney General at the Justice Department's National Fraud Enforcement Division, added: "No profession is immune from prosecution. Richeline Fung abused her positions as a federal employee and government contractor."
The case was investigated by the FBI Washington Field Office and prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Kondi Kleinman. Fung faces full restitution and sentencing on January 20, 2027. The fraud division that handled the case was announced on April 7 — part of the broader DOGE-era push to find exactly this kind of rot inside the federal payroll.
The "how" matters here. Telework made the whole scheme possible. Fung sat at home collecting six government paychecks simultaneously because not a single agency had a system in place to cross-check whether their remote employee was also someone else's remote employee. She didn't hack anything. She didn't forge credentials. She just filled out timesheets — and the machine paid her.
Some people will hear "federal fraud case" and shrug. Happens all the time. And that's exactly the problem. We spent years being told that federal telework was efficient, modern, accountable. Fung filed 15 impossible timesheets in one month and nobody flagged a single one.
The National Fraud Enforcement Division exists now. Fung is a convicted felon. The $250,000 has to come back. That's the system working — after it failed for nearly four years straight.
The question isn't whether one person gamed the system. It's how many others figured out the same trick and haven't been caught yet.