A rumor that U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and her family cashed her dead grandmother's Social Security checks for more than 14 years circulated online in March and April 2025.
For example, on April 1, the Facebook page Reagan Was Right posted (archived) a photo of Ocasio-Cortez with the caption, "AOC has no excuse for why her family has been cashing her dead Grandmother's Social Security checks for a decade and a half: 'We must have just overlooked it.' They overlooked a $3,400 deposit from the SSA every month for 14 and a half years? Sounds likely."
(Reagan Was Right/Facebook)
The first comment under the post featured a link to an article (archived) from the website The Dunning-Kruger Times. The headline read, "AOC's Family 'Overlooked' 14.5 Years of Cashing Grandma's Social Security Checks." The story began as follows:
In a shocking revelation that has left absolutely no one surprised, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is facing scrutiny over her family's alleged 14.5-year "oversight" of depositing her deceased grandmother's Social Security checks. When pressed for an explanation, AOC reportedly shrugged and said, "We must have just overlooked it."
That's right—just a little bookkeeping mix-up. Who among us hasn't accidentally cashed a $3,400 check every single month for a decade and a half? It's not like that adds up to over half a million dollars or anything. Oops!
Financial analysts say it's a totally understandable mistake. "Balancing a budget is hard," said noted economist Joe Barron. "One minute, you're paying rent, the next minute, you're mysteriously benefiting from a government payout meant for someone who no longer exists. It happens."
A number of users spread the rumor on Facebook, Gettr, TikTok, Truth Social (archived) and X.
Some readers seemed to interpret the rumor as a factual recounting of real-life events. However, there was no evidence of Ocasio-Cortez and family collecting anyone's Social Security checks.
Rather, the Reagan Was Right Facebook page and The Dunning-Kruger Times both belong to the America's Last Line of Defense network of Facebook pages and websites, whose owner describes its content as satirical in nature. Karla Santillan, Ocasio-Cortez's press secretary, commented by email that the rumor was not true.
The bio for Reagan Was Right reads, in part, "Nothing on this page is real." The photo included in the Reagan Was Right post itself displayed a label reading "S" for satire, as well as the same words, "Nothing on this page is real."
Meanwhile, The Dunning-Kruger Times features an "About Us" page describing its content as "a subsidiary of the 'America's Last Line of Defense' network of parody, satire, and tomfoolery." The page also makes a humorous mention of Snopes.
The name of the satire-based website referenced the Dunning-Kruger effect, defined by Britannica as "a cognitive bias whereby people with limited knowledge or competence in a given intellectual or social domain greatly overestimate their own knowledge or competence in that domain relative to objective criteria or to the performance of their peers or of people in general."
A previous fact check examined another untrue rumor, in which ALLOD posited U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., also collected her dead grandmother's Social Security checks.
For further reading, similar satirical claims about Ocasio-Cortez from the past included the assertion that she once posted, "Printing money is the only way out of inflation," as well as a rumor that she said, "We pay soldiers way too much."
For background, here is why we alert readers to rumors created by sources calling their output humorous or satirical.