Prince George's County man gets 6 years for $3.5 million fraud scheme

Terry Chen’s six-year prison term closes one of the largest unemployment fraud cases to touch Prince George’s County, where prosecutors said stolen benefits were siphoned away from workers who should have received them.

U.S. District Judge Deborah L. Boardman sentenced Chen, 26, of Prince George’s County, to six years in federal prison followed by three years of supervised release in Greenbelt. She also ordered him to pay $1 million in restitution and imposed a $1 million criminal forfeiture, underscoring the financial hit to a public benefits system built to help people stay afloat during hard times.

Prosecutors said Chen took part in a conspiracy that ran from May 2021 through June 2022 and fraudulently collected more than $3.5 million in unemployment insurance benefits. The operation relied on stolen personal identifying information and access to non-public Maryland Department of Labor databases, where conspirators allegedly changed claim details such as email addresses, passwords and payment methods to divert money.

Chen pleaded guilty on September 23, 2025. In his plea agreement, prosecutors said his conduct caused losses of more than $1 million but less than $1.5 million. They also said he used debit cards issued in the names of identity-theft victims to obtain fraud proceeds, a detail that shows how the stolen benefits were converted into cash outside the names of the workers the system was meant to protect.

The case also reached inside the support network around the Maryland Department of Labor. Prosecutors said co-conspirators Kiara Smith of Fort Washington and Bryan Nushawn Ruffin of Woodbridge, Virginia, worked for a company that provided support services to the department. Smith allegedly gave Chen and others a company-issued laptop that helped them access and manipulate the systems used to process unemployment claims.

The underlying case was first unsealed on December 15, 2023, when federal prosecutors announced indictments against six people: Chen, Smith, Ruffin, Lawrence Nathanial Harris, Ahmed Hussain and Zakria Hussain. The indictment put a spotlight on how insiders and outside actors could combine stolen identities with access to state databases to drain public funds on a large scale.

Kelly O. Hayes, U.S. attorney for the District of Maryland, announced the sentence with the U.S. Department of Labor Office of Inspector General and the FBI Baltimore Field Office. Prosecutors said the case was part of the Trump Administration’s Task Force to Eliminate Fraud.

For Prince George’s County, the case is more than a federal prison sentence. It is a reminder that unemployment fraud does not just vanish into paper records: it pulls money away from legitimate claimants, forces taxpayers to absorb the loss and exposes how much trust still rides on the security of state benefit systems.