Someone impersonated Gale Brewer and walked away with nearly $33,000 in city pension money. The real Gale Brewer found out only because the fund caught it first.
In the summer of 2022, while Brewer was serving as a City Council member for the Upper West Side, an unknown scammer posing as the councilmember submitted a loan request to the New York City Employees’ Retirement System. NYCERS approved the $32,980 loan instantly and transferred the funds to an account listed under Brewer’s name. By the time anyone realized what had happened, the money was gone.
“It was shocking,” Brewer told THE CITY. “If they hadn’t noticed it, I would never have known, because I never use that account. I’ve never touched it, and I’ve had it since the 1970s or 80s. All of a sudden, there’s a large loan. I couldn’t believe it.”
Brewer is not alone. She was one of 33 NYCERS pensioners whose accounts were compromised since 2020 by grifters who redirected pension checks or secured fraudulent loans, according to Department of Investigation records obtained by THE CITY through the Freedom of Information Law. The documents show NYCERS approved at least $276,000 in bogus loans through 2022, with taxpayers absorbing the losses.
The situation is not improving. DOI is currently investigating a dozen additional fraud allegations spanning 2023 through last year, and officials have declined to specify how much more public money may have vanished.
The entry point in every case was MyNYCERS, an online portal launched at the start of the pandemic to let the 430,000 members of the country’s largest municipal employee retirement system manage their accounts remotely. The portal allows members to update mailing and email addresses, change beneficiaries, reroute direct deposits to different bank accounts, and apply for loans. It was a convenience built for a crisis. It became something else.
Almost from launch, warnings circulated about the portal’s vulnerability. DOI “noticed a concerning increase in attempted fraud, particularly unauthorized access to member accounts,” according to Ann Petterson, a senior inspector general at DOI, who raised the alarm in a letter to the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office. In a June 2023 letter to then-NYCERS Executive Director Melanie Whinnery, Petterson wrote that in the first three years of MyNYCERS, “DOI was notified of 21 instances in which fraud occurred, resulting in $270,000 in losses to the city.”
That figure has since grown, and the full accounting remains incomplete.
The Brewer case illustrates how brazenly the scheme operated. She is one of the most recognizable figures in New York civic life, having served eight years as Manhattan borough president before returning to the Council. She has attended more public meetings than most people can count. And yet someone managed to impersonate her well enough to convince a pension system serving nearly half a million people to cut a check, immediately, with no apparent verification that the person on the other end of the portal was who they claimed to be.
That is the core failure here. NYCERS created a system that prioritized access and convenience, which are real and legitimate goals, but apparently did not build adequate safeguards to confirm member identity before moving large sums of money. The result has been a years-long draining of public funds from the accounts of city workers who spent careers earning those benefits.
The pension system covers teachers, sanitation workers, transit employees, and thousands of other New Yorkers who depend on those accounts for retirement security. When a scammer redirects a check or secures a fraudulent loan, the victim is not just the city treasury. It is the retiree whose financial life has been quietly disrupted, sometimes without their knowledge.
Brewer was lucky. NYCERS caught the fraud. She found out. Most people are not as visible as a former borough president, and their cases may not surface as quickly or attract the same scrutiny.
DOI’s ongoing investigation suggests this problem is larger than the documents already in hand can show. New Yorkers deserve a full accounting of how much money has been stolen, who approved the portal’s security protocols, and what has changed since the warnings first started coming in four years ago.
