BOSTON — A Lynn man who quietly kept a dead beneficiary's Social Security checks flowing for six years — pocketing more than $67,000 along the way — was sentenced Tuesday to a single day in federal prison, already served.

James C. Burdulis, 57, walked out of U.S. District Court in Boston with no meaningful jail time after Judge Allison D. Burroughs handed down the one-day sentence, three years of supervised release, and an order to repay $67,159 in restitution. Burdulis pleaded guilty in April to one count of receiving stolen government money and one count of false statements. He was charged on March 26.

The scam ran on quiet inertia. Burdulis had been appointed the beneficiary's representative payee before the beneficiary died in May 2019 — a role that requires managing another person's Social Security benefits and reporting back to the Social Security Administration in writing. When the beneficiary died, the checks were supposed to stop. They didn't. From June 2019 through June 2025, Burdulis collected $63,959 in stolen Social Security payments, plus another $3,200 in COVID-era Economic Impact Payments meant for the deceased.

He did more than just cash the checks. Between June 2020 and June 2024, Burdulis submitted five fraudulent representative payee reports to the SSA under penalty of perjury, each one certifying he had spent the money on behalf of the beneficiary — a beneficiary who had by then been dead for more than a year. In September 2020, he went further and filed a fraudulent verification form claiming the beneficiary still lived at the same address.

The case is one of the latest brought by U.S. Attorney Leah B. Foley's Benefit & Voter Fraud Team, a district-wide initiative Foley launched on March 26, 2026, in response to what her office called "rampant fraud being uncovered across Massachusetts." Two senior federal prosecutors run the team full-time as Fraud Coordinators. Massachusetts residents who suspect benefits fraud can report it to Foley's office at 1-855-SCAM-MA-1.

At the national level, the Department of Justice announced a new National Fraud Enforcement Division on April 7 to coordinate benefits-fraud prosecutions across the country. It feeds into a White House task force chaired by Vice President J.D. Vance aimed at fraud, waste, and abuse in federal benefit programs.