MIAMI, Fla. (CBS12) \u2014 A Miami man originally from South Africa pleaded guilty to aggravated identity theft after stealing a dead toddler’s identity to gain citizenship 40 years ago. <\/p>\n
In addition to the identity theft, he was also convicted on October 15 for making a false statement on a passport application.<\/p>\n
According to evidence presented during the trial, 68-year-old Vasudevan Pillay first came to the United States in 1985 with a six-month tourist visa.<\/p>\n
See also: Thanksgiving travel begins: FAA predicts busiest day with 52,000 flights<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n When Pillay arrived, prosecutors say Pillay stole the identity of a U.S. citizen who had died decades earlier as a toddler.<\/p>\n Somehow, Pillay obtained the victim’s birth certificate and used his social security number to get a Florida driver’s license in the victim’s name.<\/p>\n U.S. Attorney Jason A. Reding Qui\u00f1ones for the Southern District of Florida commented on Pillay’s decades-long ruse:<\/p>\n For nearly forty years, this defendant lived under a lie. He stole the identity of a deceased child, defrauded the government, and tried to pass himself off as an American citizen. This conviction restores accountability and reaffirms that the rule of law still matters.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Pillay faces a maximum of 10 years in prison for the false statement on a passport application and a mandatory two-year prison term for aggravated identity theft, which must run consecutively to any other sentence imposed, per court documents.<\/p>\n Find more ways to stay up to date with your latest local news. Sign up for our newsletter<\/a> to get the day’s top headlines delivered right to your inbox. Subscribe to our YouTube channel<\/a> for the biggest stories and can’t miss video.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MIAMI, Fla. (CBS12) \u2014 A Miami man originally from South Africa pleaded guilty to aggravated identity theft after…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":415518,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5133],"tags":[5229,7202,7203,358,3187,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-415517","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-antonio","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-san-antonio","10":"tag-sanantonio","11":"tag-texas","12":"tag-tx","13":"tag-united-states","14":"tag-united-states-of-america","15":"tag-unitedstates","16":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","17":"tag-us","18":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/415517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=415517"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/415517\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/415518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=415517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=415517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=415517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}