A Gale Brewer Imposter Scammed NYC’s Pension Fund Out of $32,980

This article was originally published on March 30, 2026, at 5 a.m. by THE CITY. Sign up to get the latest New York City news delivered to you each morning.

By Greg B. Smith, THE CITY

Gale Brewer has long been one of the city’s best-known elected officials.

In the summer of 2022, she was starting her second stint as a City Council member for the Upper West Side, after eight years as Manhattan borough president. Practically everybody involved in civic matters had known her for decades. At times, she attended so many public meetings, it seemed she had the ability to appear in two places at once.

And then one day, she was.

While Councilmember Gale Brewer was going about her city business, someone purporting to be Gale Brewer requested a $32,980 loan from the pension fund for city employees known as the New York City Employment Retirement System (NYCERS). The loan was approved instantly, and the money quickly transferred to an account listed as hers.

The real Gale Brewer had no idea this had occurred. And by the time NYCERS figured out they had been scammed by some unknown miscreant masquerading as Brewer, it was too late.

The money was gone.

“It was shocking,” Brewer told THE CITY. “If they hadn’t noticed it, I would never have known, because I never use that account. I’ve never touched it, and I’ve had it since the 1970s or 80s. All of a sudden, there’s a large loan. I couldn’t believe it.”

Brewer was one of 33 NYCERS pensioners whose accounts were hacked since 2020 by grifters who managed to redirect pension checks or obtain scam loans, according to Department of Investigation records obtained by THE CITY via the Freedom of Information Law.

The documents indicate NYCERS approved at least $276,000 in bogus loans through 2022, with taxpayers footing the bill. And the losses are expected to grow: DOI is investigating a dozen more allegations of NYCERS fraud between 2023 and last year.

In each case, the gateway for larceny was MyNYCERS, a portal set up at the start of the pandemic to allow the 430,000 members of the country’s largest municipal employee retirement system to manage their accounts online.

Among other features, the system allows members to update home and email addresses and beneficiaries, to reroute checks to different bank accounts and to apply for loans. Almost from the start, alarm bells began ringing about MyNYCERS’ potential vulnerability to theft.

DOI soon “noticed a concerning increase in attempted fraud, particularly unauthorized access to member accounts,” Ann Petterson, a senior inspector general at DOI, wrote to the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office.

In the first three years of MyNYCERS, “DOI was notified of 21 instances in which fraud occurred, resulting in $270,000 in losses to the city,” Petterson wrote in a June 2023 letter to then-NYCERS Executive Director Melanie Whinnery.

From 2023 through last year, DOI has fielded a dozen more fraud notices. DOI officials declined to quantify the losses from the most recent fraud activities, saying they were the subject of ongoing investigations.

In one 2021 case, when a fraudster scammed a $95,000 loan, Petterson wrote to Whinnery, “Although the member did not suffer any financial loss, (there was) an approximately $95,000 loss to the city.”

That same year, one scammer obtained a $50,000 loan via the account of an $18-an-hour Department of Education school aide. Another pocketed a $50,000 loan via the account of a New York City Transit Authority worker.

Bogus Brewer

Councilmember Brewer’s saga began on March 25, 2022, when someone claiming to be her called NYCERS to say they were having problems submitting a loan application online. The caller later relayed to NYCERS that the system was now working, indicating they had obtained the requested loan application.

A few weeks later, the imposter tried a different tactic, submitting a form online that requested Brewer’s pension payments be redirected to a GO2Bank mobile account. NYCERS declined because Brewer is still an active employee and was not yet eligible to begin collecting her pension. A second attempt to change bank accounts also was rejected.

Then on May 1, a form was submitted designating a person named “Heidie Perez” as a beneficiary of Brewer’s account. The address listed for the beneficiary was Brewer’s address, but the social security number and birth date belonged to Brewer’s husband. The phone number and email address on the form were fraudulent.

Despite these indicators of duplicity, on June 27, a loan application was filed for $32,980 using Brewer’s account. NYCERS transferred the requested amount within two days to an account at Regions Bank listed under Brewer’s name.

A week later, NYCERS — for reasons a spokesperson would not discuss with THE CITY — decided the loan obtained by “Brewer” was bogus, and attempted to claw it back. By then, however, the bank account in which the money had been deposited was now nearly empty, DOI records state.

Because of this breach, NYCERS suspended Brewer’s account, requiring her to provide documentation to verify that the account’s activity going forward was legitimate.

“All I did was follow the directions. You have to freeze your account. You have to go to the cops and get paperwork. It took hours,” she said. “I had to get a lot of things notarized.”

NYCERS, she made a point of saying, “could not have been nicer.”

Culprit Still At Large

DOI’s pursuit of the culprit, however, did not go so nicely.

The IP address of an email linked to the Regions Bank account was tied to a city Parks Department employee who told DOI that her account had been hacked during a prior T-Mobile data breach.

DOI subpoenaed Regions and found the account had been opened under the name Gale Brewer, but included a signature card with an email address and phone number that were not connected to her. DOI then subpoenaed records from Microsoft and Apple, which connected the address and phone number to a man in Tampa named Scobey.

According to an internal April 2025 DOI memo, investigators couldn’t connect the IP address used by that individual directly to the loan activity, thus they couldn’t refer the case to prosecutors for criminal prosecution.

In January 2024, DOI did refer six individuals who had been accused of ripping off the system to Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez, including two who had each pocketed $50,000 loans. The DA declined to prosecute any of them.

Asked about the lack of prosecution, spokesperson Oren Yaniv stated, “We take any allegations of official misconduct very seriously and investigated these matters thoroughly, but jurisdictional and evidentiary issues preclude prosecution.”

Fake Forms

Last year, Gonzalez did prosecute Gregory Mathieu, then an associate retirement benefits examiner assigned to the NYCERS pension verification unit. Mathieu was charged with diverting $624,000 from two deceased retirees to accounts he controlled from February 2021 through January 2024.

DOI found that Mathieu had been able to reactivate the account of a Sanitation Department supervisor who died in 2018 by forging a handwritten form claiming to be from the deceased city employee. This triggered NYCERS to authorize $225,000 in immediate retroactive payments, made in monthly installments of $99,999.

The first installment automatically went to the bank account of the deceased sanitation worker that NYCERS had on file, but that account had been closed long ago. Mathieu then set up an online account in the dead pensioner’s name, DOI found, and when checks issued by the comptroller were returned, Mathieu switched to have the funds automatically transferred via MyNYCERS to the account electronically.

With a second pensioner who was still alive but who had stopped responding to NYCERS inquiries for a year, prosecutors say Mathieu created a form directing that his monthly payments go to the same account he’d created for the deceased employee via electronic fund transfers.

Mathieu appears to have entered the agency’s mailroom to surreptitiously place the form in an envelope he then timestamped to make it seem like it came from the pensioner. DOI noted that NYCERS protocols do not require account verifications for electronic fund transfers received by mail.

Mathieu was sentenced in September to up to 3 years in prison and agreed to pay $511,000 in restitution.

That same month, DOI made 11 recommendations for reform, including conducting audits of accounts suspended for more than three years to ensure a member is still alive.

DOI records indicate NYCERS accepted most of the recommendations fully, but only partially accepted three suggestions, including one to develop internal fraud algorithms based on risk indicators that alert staff to duplicate bank accounts and requests to high-risk banks.

In response to THE CITY’s questions, Rachel Assisi, deputy director for communications at NYCERS, declined to address queries about specific accounts, including Brewer’s.

“When NYCERS discovered several instances of fraudulent activity in 2021, we notified DOI, who investigated these incidents,” Assisi said. “Subsequent to these incidents, NYCERS proactively strengthened security controls, which has resulted in a dramatic decrease in fraudulent activity.”

Assisi noted that the system is moving to fully embrace all of DOI’s reforms, including “implementing additional internal fraud algorithms and identifying additional methods to authenticate our client transactions.”

“NYCERS continues to collaborate with DOI and has implemented the majority of their recommendations,” she said.