In September 2025, Kelly Ballinger — a 59-year-old property manager overseeing Housing Choice Voucher participants in Portland, Maine — was sentenced to five years in federal prison after a HUD Office of Inspector General investigation uncovered a nearly six-year embezzlement scheme targeting low-income, elderly, and disabled Section 8 tenants. Ballinger, working with a co-conspirator, instructed tenants to purchase postal money orders and leave the payee line blank, then filled in her own name to redirect rent payments into her personal bank account. She and her co-conspirator simultaneously falsified income and expense documentation submitted to HUD, artificially inflating federal rental subsidy disbursements that were then funneled away from their intended purpose. The scheme ran undetected from October 2015 through June 2021, spanning dozens of vulnerable households who had no reason to question what appeared to be routine payment instructions from a trusted housing authority. Among those affected was a disabled elderly renter on a fixed Social Security income who had followed Ballinger's money order instructions without exception for more than four years, never knowing her compliance was the mechanism of her own exploitation.