She Worked Full-Time for DHS — and Simultaneously for Six Other Federal Agencies. Now She’s a Convicted Felon.
- Nearly $250,000 in federal funds Richeline Anisso Fung obtained through fraud by certifying hours she never worked, per the U.S. Attorney's Office — USAO-DC
- 9 years Fung's tenure as a full-time, fully remote employee of DHS's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Sept. 2016 to Oct. 2025 — USAO-DC
- 6 additional federal agencies where Fung simultaneously held paid contractor or consulting positions — DEA, Energy, DOJ, FHWA, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and USDA — USAO-DC
- 33 hours the most Fung certified working in a single calendar day, in February 2022, across DHS-CISA and three contractor postings at once — USAO-DC
Richeline Anisso Fung spent nine years as a full-time employee of the federal agency built to guard the country’s most sensitive computer networks — the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, inside the Department of Homeland Security. For roughly three and a half of those years — January 2021 to August 2024, prosecutors say — she was also drawing a second paycheck. And a third. And, in some months, a fourth, fifth, and sixth.
On September 2, 2026, Fung, 46, of Pembroke Pines, Florida, pleaded guilty in federal court in Washington, D.C., to defrauding the government of nearly $250,000 by certifying — and getting paid for — work hours that, added together across her multiple government jobs, routinely exceeded 24 hours in a single day.
Fung joined DHS-CISA in September 2016 and worked there full time, entirely by telework, for the next nine years, living for part of that stretch in Maryland before relocating to Pembroke Pines, Florida. Starting in January 2021, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, she began taking on paid contractor and consulting positions at six additional federal agencies — the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Department of Energy, the Department of Justice, the Federal Highway Administration, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Some of that outside work came through direct hire; some ran through RAF Pro-Consulting, a Florida consulting LLC Fung had incorporated in 2020 and used, prosecutors say, as a channel for the contractor income. Because every one of the seven positions was remote, no single supervisor could see what she was doing on anyone else’s clock — and, per the U.S. Attorney’s Office, she disclosed none of the other jobs to any of the agencies paying her. The arrangement let her draw a full-time federal salary and up to six additional streams of contractor pay for the same 24-hour day, agency by agency, for roughly three and a half straight years, from January 2021 to August 2024.
The scheme collapsed on arithmetic. Federal timesheets require employees to certify, under penalty of law, the hours they actually worked in a pay period. Fung’s certifications, prosecutors say, treated each of her jobs as if the others didn’t exist — logging a full workday at DHS-CISA, then logging more full workdays, the same day, for whichever contractor roles she held at the time. February 2022 illustrates how far the fabrication went: combining her DHS-CISA hours with three simultaneous contractor postings, at USDA, FHWA, and DOJ, Fung certified more than 24 hours of work in a single calendar day on 15 separate days that month — including four days billed at 33 hours and one at 32, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. There are only 24 hours in a day.
Fung kept certifying those overlapping hours across seven separate payroll systems for roughly three and a half years — from January 2021, when she added her first outside role, until August 2024, when the overlapping contractor employment ended, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office — before a joint federal investigation caught up with the arithmetic. She remained a full-time DHS-CISA employee for another year beyond that, until her tenure there ended in October 2025.
No single agency’s payroll office caught Fung. The case was unwound by a joint investigation involving the Offices of Inspector General for AmeriCorps, DHS, and HHS, working alongside the FBI’s Washington Field Office — a cross-agency effort that had to reconstruct her overlapping employment history from records no one agency held on its own, since each of the seven payroll systems she was drawing from only ever saw its own slice of her calendar. That reconstruction is what finally surfaced the impossible math behind her timesheets. She pleaded guilty to one federal count of making false, fictitious, or fraudulent claims before Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan, a U.S. District Judge for the District of Columbia seated in January 2025, who accepted the plea. The plea agreement requires Fung to pay full restitution of the loss. Sentencing is scheduled for January 20, 2027. Assistant U.S. Attorney Kondi Kleinman prosecuted the case.
“Richeline Fung stole a quarter-million dollars from the American taxpayer, and today she stands as a convicted felon who will be required to pay full restitution. Let this be unmistakable: if you defraud the American people, federal agents will come knocking.”
U.S. Attorney Jeanine Ferris Pirro, District of Columbia, Sept. 2, 2026
Richeline Anisso Fung, 46, pleaded guilty today in U.S. District Court to making false, fictitious, or fraudulent claims while working as a full-time employee for the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (DHS-CISA).
DC beat: Richeline Anisso Fung, 46, of Pembroke Pines, Florida, ex of Maryland, pled guilty today in DDC to making false, fictitious, or fraudulent claims while working as a full-time employee for DHS' Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency
The prosecution is one of the early public results of a piece of DOJ machinery that didn’t exist a year earlier. On April 1, 2026, Vice President JD Vance swore in Colin M. McDonald as the first Assistant Attorney General to lead the newly created National Fraud Enforcement Division. “No profession is immune from prosecution,” McDonald said of Fung’s case. “Richeline Fung abused her positions as a federal employee and government contractor to steal nearly $250,000 from the U.S. government. Public service is a public trust, not an opportunity to defraud American taxpayers. We will continue to hold accountable anyone who defrauds the United States, regardless of title or agency.”
McDonald’s division grew out of President Trump’s Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, a government-wide crackdown he put Vice President Vance in charge of in April 2026, calling him the government’s “Fraud Czar.” The accountability story here runs the opposite direction from most of what appears in this section: nine years of one employee defrauding six federal agencies at once slipped past ordinary payroll and HR controls at every one of those agencies — until a dedicated fraud task force, working with a joint team of agency inspectors general and the FBI, actually caught it.
Vice President JD Vance is now in charge of 'FRAUD' in the United States. It is massive and pervasive... We will call him the 'FRAUD CZAR.'
Trump announces the Fraud Czar role that led to DOJ's National Fraud Enforcement Division — the unit that prosecuted this case
No dedicated press-conference video exists for the Fung case specifically. The clips below are Task Force to Eliminate Fraud context — the broader initiative Fung’s prosecution now sits under — not case-specific footage.
Fung’s nine years at CISA spanned four different DHS leadership eras, including under Kristi Noem, who departed as DHS Secretary in March 2026. The department is now run by Secretary Markwayne Mullin (R-OK), confirmed by the Senate 54-45 on March 24, 2026 — roughly five months before Fung’s guilty plea and well after her fraudulent double- and triple-billing had already ended. CISA itself has had no permanent director since early 2026; Nick Andersen currently serves as acting director. That leadership churn sits alongside a separate finding from the DHS Office of Inspector General, which reported in September 2025 that CISA had mismanaged its own cybersecurity retention-incentive program and wasted funds meant to keep critical talent — a reminder that the agency now explaining how one of its own employees drew paychecks from six other federal agencies for roughly three and a half years has its own unresolved internal-controls problems.
Richeline Anisso Fung worked a full-time, fully remote job at DHS’s cybersecurity agency for nine years while secretly holding paid positions at six other federal agencies at once, certifying combined hours that topped 24 in a single day on at least 15 occasions in one month alone. She pleaded guilty on September 2, 2026, to one federal false-claims count, agreed to pay full restitution of nearly $250,000, and faces sentencing on January 20, 2027. No single agency’s payroll system caught her — it took a joint investigation by three inspectors general and the FBI, funneled through DOJ’s six-month-old National Fraud Enforcement Division, to do it.
