Woman pleads guilty to claiming disability payments while competing in Mrs Universe bodybuilding events
A bodybuilder in the UK swindled $74,000 in disability payments while competing at international events.
Maria Hughes claimed her body as riddled with arthritis, with piercing pains in her knees, wrists and back that forced her to shuffle around her home on her bottom, The Mirror reports.
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Hughes reaped the payments over six years, but footage surfaced of her flexing her muscles at the 2013 Mr and Mrs Universe completion in Hamburg, Germany.
The buff broad of welfare fraud came sixth, competing under the name Maria Glazowska.
On Friday the 45-year-old lifter pleaded guilty to pocketing cash from the Disability Living Allowance, showing up to the Stoke Crown Court in a wheelchair.
In a number of interviews as her alter ego, Hughes boasted about embracing her disciplined body in her 40s, having turned from a life of "hard clubbing, rave scene, party animal".
"Quite simply I was built for bodybuilding so I decided to do what Mother Nature obviously intended my body to do, which was to lift, and lift," Hughes said in one interview.
"Now I just love seeing my body constantly develop and change."
She will be sentenced next month.
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