A former employee of the Federal Housing and Urban Development Office in Albany was sentenced for defrauding co-workers by claiming he had cancer.

Our area's U.S. District Attorney's Office says 60-year-old Timothy Oravec pretended to have cancer and used leave time donated by those co-workers.

As part of a guilty plea, Oravec admitted he created fake letters from medical providers in 2013 and offered them to managers as proof he was sick.

The whole scheme was only found out when a similar note was questioned five years later.

Oravec was sentenced to four months in jail, with three years of supervised release.