Three New Jersey residents are accused of siphoning roughly $1.1 million out of New York City's rental assistance program by posing as distressed tenants and routing the payments into accounts disguised as landlords' accounts. Officials announced the charges against Erica Williams, Kareem Canty and Tajizhanae Whitaker this past Thursday, alleging the scheme ran from 2021 through 2025 and relied on dozens of fraudulent applications submitted to the city's Human Resources Administration.
According to the New York Post, Williams, 39, of Union, New Jersey, allegedly spearheaded the operation, posing as a tenant facing hardship while directing the resulting rental payments to accounts falsely presented as belonging to landlords. She was accused alongside Canty, 33, of East Orange, and Whitaker, 29, of Dacula, New Jersey. Prosecutors reportedly said the three provided HRA with tenants' names, birthdates and Social Security numbers to push the fake applications through, and that some of the tenants whose information was used did not know about the alleged scheme.
Of the group's 170 applications, the city's Human Resources Administration approved 94 of them, according to prosecutors cited by the Post, ultimately issuing the trio approximately $1.1 million in funds. The program at issue is intended to assist low-income New Yorkers, and HRA is supposed to send those payments directly to a tenant's landlord or property manager rather than to the tenant.
Arrests and an Ongoing Multi-Agency Probe
Department of Investigation Commissioner Nadia Shihata announced the charges Thursday. Williams, Canty and Whitaker were arrested Wednesday morning in a joint investigation involving the city Department of Investigation, the Manhattan U.S. Attorney's Office and the Internal Revenue Service, per the same report. Whitaker was arrested in Georgia and remained in custody there as of Thursday, while Williams and Canty appeared in Manhattan court Wednesday evening and were released after posting $50,000 bond apiece.
If convicted of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, the three face a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, the outlet reported. A conviction on aggravated identity theft carries a minimum sentence of two years.
How the Rental Aid Programs Are Supposed to Work
The scheme described by prosecutors echoes the mechanics of the city's One Shot Deal emergency assistance program, which offers up to six months of rental payments to New Yorkers unable to afford rent because of unexpected hardship such as job loss or a medical emergency. ACCESS NYC describes the program as available to people who cannot pay their bills due to lost income or another sudden emergency, though the city's own data shows it is not an easy benefit to collect. Between January and September 2022, the Department of Social Services rejected 66% of applications specifically tied to rent arrears, according to Gothamist, with approved grants averaging around $4,300 that fiscal year.
This is not the first time federal prosecutors have pursued allegations of rental-assistance fraud tied to New York City programs. A 2021 complaint unsealed by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York charged a Queens man with defrauding HRA and other city housing programs by falsely claiming to own 20 properties and collecting assistance funds as their purported landlord, according to the Southern District of New York U.S. Attorney's Office. A separate 2016 case, also brought by that office, involved an HRA supervisor who pleaded guilty to defrauding two public assistance programs, with rental-assistance checks mailed to co-conspirators posing as landlords of low-income tenants.
A Separate Audit Flags Oversight Gaps in Rental Programs
Rental assistance in New York has drawn scrutiny beyond criminal cases. A New York State Comptroller audit of the separate CityFHEPS voucher program, reported by PIX11, found unsafe apartments, missing case documentation, weak landlord oversight and improper voucher payments. Auditors reviewed 75 cases out of a pool of about 8,000 spanning January 2022 to May 2024 and examined $671 million in contracts across seven providers, finding that half of the files reviewed lacked required proof of income or eligibility, with some families placed in units with mold, infestations or missing window guards. The city's Department of Social Services attributed many of the issues to an outdated database and a migration to a newer system, noting that CityFHEPS serves roughly 65,000 households across the five boroughs.
That audit concerns a different program than the one at the center of the New Jersey trio's case, and it does not speak to the specific allegations against Williams, Canty or Whitaker. Other recent cases underscore that rental-aid fraud allegations have surfaced in multiple forms statewide: a sealed indictment announced by the New York State Comptroller's office in January accused a pair of siblings of stealing $90,000 in Emergency Rental Assistance Program funds they were not entitled to.
