Arizona woman sentenced 136 months in prison for elder wire fraud
Oct 20, 2022, 4:25 AM
PHOENIX — An Arizona woman was sentenced on Wednesday to 136 months in prison after pleading guilty to two counts of wire fraud, authorities said.
Koreasa Maria Williams, 47, of Tucson, was a licensed insurance agent who frauded an 80-year-old client of over $1 million, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Arizona said in a press release Wednesday.
In Oct. 2018, Williams was under investigation for a separate annuity theft scheme and advised her victim to cash out eight life insurance policies and obtain close to $1 million.
She told her victim that life insurance funds would be better invested into annuities. The victim then sent two checks totaling over $1 million to a law firm that supposedly worked with Williams’ annuity company, according to the release.
Williams told the law firm the checks were a loan from her “rich uncle” and directed the law firm to pay back multiple victims from her previous annuity scheme to avoid criminal charges.
After she was indicted for her role in the annuity theft scheme and released on bond in May 2019, she convinced the same victim to give her money from June through December.
She used that money to provide for herself and her family via thousands of dollars of bulk cash withdrawals, supermarket and convenience store debits, car payments, cable fees, movie theater purchases, and donations to a religious ministry in North Carolina with which Williams was affiliated, her local church and a local charity, authorities said.
