Monmouth County Man Sentenced to Prison for Defrauding SSA

U.S. Attorney's Office, District of New Jersey

A Monmouth County man was sentenced to a year and a day in prison after being convicted of defrauding the Social Security Administration, U.S. Attorney Robert Frazer announced. 

Steven D. Stankovits, 57, of Matawan, New Jersey, was sentenced to a year and a day in prison by U.S. District Judge Zahid N. Quraishi in Trenton federal court on July 21, 2026.  Stankovits was also ordered to pay a $50,000 fine, restitution of $585,629.80, and to forfeit $480,968 in ill-gotten proceeds.  This followed Stankovits’s conviction on March 5, 2026, after a jury trial of four counts of wire fraud and one count of false statements to the Social Security Administration, all related to his receipt of Disability Insurance Benefits. 

According to documents filed in this case and statements made in court: 

In May 2010, Stankovits was found eligible for Social Security Disability Insurance Benefits, and received benefits retroactive to 2007. This finding of eligibility was based on lies to the Social Security Administration, including that Stankovits was unable to work, could not comfortably sit for more than 15 minutes, could not bend down to put on his clothes, struggled to lift a carton of milk, and had been forced to give up skiing.  Stankovits failed to correct and reiterated these lies through statements and written submissions to the Social Security Administration over the next ten years.  As a result, the Social Security Administration paid more than $585,000 in disability benefits. 

In fact, Stankovits was a licensed funeral director working at two different funeral homes.  Stankovits’s work included gardening, shoveling snow, carrying 160-pound caskets down a flight of stairs, and climbing a ladder onto the roof to install a sign.  In addition, Stankovits took long flights to go skiing in Cortina, Italy, Lake Tahoe, and Park City, Utah, and purchased a skiing season pass in Killington, Vermont. All of this conduct was incompatible with Stankovits’s repeated lies to the Social Security Administration for nearly 15 years.     

U.S. Attorney Robert Frazer credited agents of the Social Security Administration Office of the Inspector General, New York Field Division, under the direction of Special Agent-in-Charge Conor Washington, and the Social Security Administration’s New Jersey-based Cooperative Disability Investigations Unit, under the direction of Assistant Special Agent-in-Charge, Gilberto Camilo. 

The government is represented by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Eli Jacobs and Alison Thompson of the Organized Crime and Gangs Unit of the U.S. Attorney’s Office.