A 33-year-old Reidsville man has been sentenced to 15 months in prison for his role in a bank fraud scheme that stole stolen identities to loot bank accounts across western North Carolina, with losses topping $650,000. Jacob Lawson will also serve three years of supervised release once he's out.
According to WCCB Charlotte, Lawson ran the scheme with a co-conspirator identified in that report as Cordara Maddox, 39, from July 2021 through April 2025. A Justice Department search snippet, however, refers to the co-conspirator as Cordara Mattox, so the correct spelling of the surname remains unclear based on the available reporting.
Court documents cited by the station describe a coordinated impersonation operation. The co-conspirator contacted financial institutions while posing as real account holders, then requested replacement credit and debit cards in those victims' names. Once the cards arrived, Lawson and his partner allegedly used them to make transactions at retail stores, according to WCCB Charlotte's report.
At Least 10 Victims Targeted
Investigators say the scheme defrauded at least 10 identity-theft victims in western North Carolina and elsewhere, per the same account. U.S. Attorney Russ Ferguson, who leads the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District of North Carolina, said the fraud caused losses of more than $650,000.
Both Lawson and his co-conspirator pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bank fraud, the station reported. A separate account from justice.gov states that the pair were ordered to pay $656,781.46 in restitution, though the full details of that order were not available beyond the cited search snippet.
Differing Sentences for Co-Conspirator
The co-conspirator's punishment differed from Lawson's. That individual was previously sentenced to 30 months in prison and will serve five years of supervised release upon release, according to WCCB Charlotte's reporting. Lawson's own sentence — 15 months followed by three years of supervised release — was shorter on both counts.
The case adds to a string of bank fraud prosecutions pursued by federal authorities in the Western District of North Carolina, though no additional comparable cases or broader trend data were included in the available reporting. As it stands, the scheme's exact toll on the more than 10 identified victims, and the final resolution of the restitution order, rest on the figures already cited by justice.gov and the local station.
