{"id":537729,"date":"2010-04-21T15:40:38","date_gmt":"2010-04-21T19:40:38","guid":{"rendered":"tag:consumerist.com,2010:\/\/1.10004817"},"modified":"2010-04-21T15:42:23","modified_gmt":"2010-04-21T19:42:23","slug":"fake-irs-agent-racks-up-55k-in-hotel-bills","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/537729","title":{"rendered":"Fake IRS Agent Racks Up $55K In Hotel Bills"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/consumerist.com\/assets_c\/2010\/04\/IRSsign-thumb-240x160-39568.jpg\">         <\/p>\n<p>A woman in California lived for free in a hotel room for two years &#8212; a $55,000 bill &#8212; by pretending to be an IRS agent. Of course, now she&#8217;s been caught and has to pay it all back.<\/p>\n<p>According to reports, the woman actually began living in the hotel in Novato, CA, about 40 miles north of San Francisco, in 2002. That&#8217;s also when she began telling hotel employees her made-up tale about being an agent for the Internal Revenue Service.<\/p>\n<p>However, she apparently had no problem paying for her room on time until 2008, at which point she told a hotel co-owner that she would not be paid again until the completion of her current (nonexistent) investigation for the IRS. She even told them to write letters to the IRS &#8212; which she promised to delivery &#8212; explaining their need to be paid.<\/p>\n<p>It all caught up with her earlier this year, when the woman ultimately pleaded guilty to charges of impersonating a federal officer. But rather than send the woman, now in her 60s and diabetic, to prison, she was given five years of supervised probation and ordered to pay the $55K to the hotel owners.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.sfgate.com\/cgi-bin\/article.cgi?f=\/c\/a\/2010\/04\/21\/BA341D1S10.DTL\" >Fake IRS agent told to pay $55,000 hotel bill<\/a> [SF Chronicle]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A woman in California lived for free in a hotel room for two years &#8212; a $55,000 bill &#8212; by pretending to be an IRS agent. Of course, now she&#8217;s been caught and has to pay it all back. According to reports, the woman actually began living in the hotel in Novato, CA, about 40 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5519,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-537729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5519"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=537729"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537729\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=537729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=537729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=537729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}