Mother Stole Estranged Daughter's Identity To Join University, Date Younger Men

A 48-year-old Missouri mother is facing jail time after she pleaded guilty to stealing her estranged daughter’s identity in order to secure student loans, enroll in university, obtain a driver’s license, and date younger men.

Laura Oglesby is now facing up to five years in prison without parole for posing as her daughter, Lauren Hays, and scamming the federal government and locals in the small town of Mountain View for more than two years.

The elaborate scam started in 2016 when Oglesby posed as her then 22-year-old daughter to apply for a social security card. She used the card to obtain a Missouri driver's license.

"She had put together a full false ID — she had gotten a Missouri ID and gotten a valid Social Security number, the whole bit," Stetson Schwien, assistant chief of the Mountain View Police Department in Missouri, said in a phone interview with NBC News.

Oglesby had moved in with local couple Avery and Wendy Parker, who believed she was a young woman running away from a domestic violence situation. She went on to live with the apparently kind strangers for close to two years.

It is understood that it was during this period she used her social security card again to enroll at Southwest Baptist University in Missouri. She even applied for financial aid and received $9,400 in federal student loans, $5,920 in Pell Grants, $337 for books from the university bookstore, and $1,863 in finance charges.

Oglesby also reportedly started dating unsuspecting men in their early 20s, who had no idea that the imposter was almost two decades older than she claimed she was.

"Everyone believed it. She even had boyfriends that believed that she was that age: 22 years old," Chief Jamie Perkins of the Mountain View Police Department told the New York Times.

Photos from her Snapchat account appear to show Oglesby pretending to be her daughter by using an array of youthful filters over her face.

"She had completely adopted a younger lifestyle: clothing, makeup, and personality. She had completely assumed becoming a younger person in her early 20s," Schwien, told the outlet.

Schwien said the investigation began in 2018 when detectives from the Jonesboro, Arkansas, police department alerted him of a suspect involved in a fraud investigation living in Missouri under a false identity after fleeing the state from a "full U.S. extradition warrant"

The investigators identified and located Oglesby, who initially denied the accusations. However, it’s reported that she subsequently broke down and confessed to committing the fraud.

She told the investigators that she assumed the fake identity to flee an abusive relationship.

"I have never seen an ID case like this at all, whether from fleeing from abuse or any other type," Schwien said.

"Usually, the ones I see, people are trying to assume an ID for financial gains, like credit card fraud," he added.

Oglesby has pleaded guilty to one count of Social Security fraud and agreed to pay at least $17,000 in restitution to Southwest Baptist University and to her daughter.