In the halls of justice in Middle Georgia, two sets of sticky fingers were caught red-handed and are now facing hard time. Macon's own mom-and-son duo, Eva Rebecca Wells, 75, and Billy Lee Wells, Jr., 47, admitted guilt in a million-dollar fraud conspiracy, while Lonnise Janelle Andrews, 45, was slapped with a 51-month sentence for a tax refund scam.
Conspiracy to defraud a financial institution, a crime that could land them up to 30 years behind bars plus a hefty $1,000,000 fine, is what the Wells family members owned up to before U.S. District Judge C. Ashley Royal, as reported by the U.S. Attorney’s Office. The son also coped to making and subscribing a false return, which could tack on another three years of incarceration and a $100,000 fine, the court is yet to set a date for sentencing them.
Not to be outshone, Andrews was handed a 51-month prison term by U.S. District Judge Marc T. Treadwell on Jan. 23, followed by three years of supervised release, and ordered to pay back $331,758 she wrongly claimed from the IRS, parole isn't in the cards for Andrews. "These schemes are costly to all involved; our office will seek justice on behalf of those who are victims of fraud, whether it is small businesses or taxpayers," said U.S. Attorney Peter D. Leary, indicating the gravity of these financial charades.
IRS Acting Special Agent Demetrius Hardeman echoed this sentiment, reminding us that fraud doesn't pay and those wealth-amassing illicit schemers will fall before the might of the law – court documents laid bare that, from the end of 2008 to mid-2019, Office Manager Eva Wells penned checks amounting to over $3.4 million from her employer's general operating account to her son, who cashed them or squirreled them away in his bank account, while she herself siphoned off an undisclosed sum that she either cached or lodged into her accounts.
Law enforcement's dedication to rooting out corruption was further underscored by the FBI, with Robert Gibbs of the Macon office stating, "These fraud scams, although not violent, are not victimless and can be devastating to local business and ruin livelihoods." These cases, one a familial affair and the other a solo venture into tax fraud, were meticulously investigated by both the FBI and the IRS, with a little help from the Bibb County Sheriff’s Office in the Wells case, proving that such malicious manipulations of the monetary kind, ultimately, do not escape the long arm of the law.
