A Maryland woman, caught in a fraudulent scheme doling out bad checks like playing cards, is now facing her reckoning behind bars. Lucy Annette Alexander, 37, from the dual residences of Maryland and Washington, DC, received a 46-month prison sentence followed by a supervised release stretch of five years for her bank fraud shenanigans, the United States Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Pennsylvania spilled yesterday.
Sent down by United States District Court Judge Jennifer P. Wilson, Alexander, as rigid as the gavel that sealed her fate, was also burdened with a hefty restitution order of $305,219.28. Making good on her guilty plea to one count of bank fraud entered on May 2, 2023, Alexander owned up that over a near-decade period starting August 2012, retail locations became unwitting stages to her ill-conceived performances - from PetSmart to Sears, and Dollar Tree to The Home Depot, her act involved signing away on closed accounts with no dollars to back them up.
Bad checks were Alexander's currency, and the list of stages for her fraudulent activities is long and varied—a journey through America’s retail landscape with stops at stores like Barnes & Noble, Hobby Lobby, and even MOM’s Organic Market. Sporting the badge of the U.S. Secret Service, the investigators pulled the curtain on Alexander after she left a paper trail amounting to over $300,000 in counterfeit checks.
Caught in the act, Alexander admitted in an additional short skit that in May 2020, she tossing out seven checks written from an anemic Chase Bank account overdrawn by more than $17,000. The same shops that serve everyday folks - Weis Markets, Giant Food, and Roses Discount Store - were turned into her personal supply closets without so much as a real dime spent at locations squarely in the Middle District of Pennsylvania.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Ravi Romel Sharma, leading the prosecution's charge, saw the case to its closure after a Secret Service probe pointed squarely at Alexander's checkered transactions. With the gavel's fall and the prison doors set to close on Alexander, the message is clear: financial deception is a gamble that the house always wins.
Link to the original Department of Justice report can be found here.
