Friend Fraudulently Listed My Boyfriend As His Landlord On An Application For Government Assistance

Location: Pennsylvania My boyfriend has a good friend who recently got out of jail and is currently on parole. When the friend was released, he moved in with boyfriend’s mother because he needed a place to stay. He pays her $400 a month. Mom is on social security disability and Medicare.

The friend recently applied for some kind of government assistance program that gives him some amount of money per month as well as health insurance. When he applied, he was required to provide information about his housing situation. Mom didn’t want him to include anything about her as she feared it would impact her own disability and health care benefits. The friend asked my boyfriend if he could use his name as the landlord, and my boyfriend said no and assumed that was the end of it. The friend then made up a rental agreement with mom’s address but stating that he was paying $875 a month, to my boyfriend. The date on the “lease” is December 2024. He submitted this with the application for the government assistance. The rental agreement has a signature at the bottom that is presumably supposed to be my boyfriend’s, though he and his mother both have the same first initial and last name and that’s all the signature contains. My boyfriend did not sign the document, and the signature does not look like his mother’s. My boyfriend’s name is listed as the landlord on the document. The government program the friend applied for apparently called his mom and questioned why the friend was paying my boyfriend and not her, and she lied and told them that my boyfriend still lives there and that he was the one handling the friend living there. The program never called my boyfriend, but that doesn’t make sense because why would they call his mom and not the actual “landlord” listed? I feel like the friend probably gave them a different number and pretended to be my boyfriend when they called or something like that, thought this is just my suspicion and not something that has been confirmed. I’m not sure how long ago this happened, but the friend has been receiving the benefits for some time and my boyfriend just found out about all of this.

I guess the question is, what is he even supposed to do in this situation? I’m concerned that he’ll be expected to pay income tax on these “rent” payments, but he has never received any money from mom or friend and does not contribute to the expenses of that household at all. He has not lived in that house for well over 5 years, but the friend is staying in his childhood bedroom so I guess his logic is that he’s renting the room from my boyfriend. Another concern is that this is fraud, and what the legal implications may be if any of this is discovered by any of the government systems involved between the friend being on assistance and parole, as well as the mom being on disability and Medicare. My boyfriend has never received any of these government benefits, so the friend is saying that it couldn’t be traced back to him because he isn’t in the systems but that doesn’t seem valid (boyfriend did get unemployment for a little bit during the pandemic so he’s in that system at the very least). My boyfriend has asked the friend to cancel the benefit but I’m not sure how we would verify that that actually happens. Also, even if he does cancel it, at least some of the original application was fraudulent and has my boyfriend’s name on it. Would canceling it even be the correct step to take to fix this? Are there any steps that we should take to ensure this gets taken care of? He doesn’t want to get either his mom or friend in trouble, but he also doesn’t want to be involved in this situation or have it negatively affect him.