A 50-year-old Norfolk woman was sentenced Wednesday to 129 months in federal prison for operating multiple fraud schemes that included stealing the identities of local prisoners.
According to court documents, less than a month after her release from federal prison for a prior fraud scheme, Teresa Gallop “undertook two new sophisticated frauds.”
In the first, Gallop created a fake legal services company that she used to lure inmates of local jails to disclose their identifying information and to release their personal property, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia.
Gallop used her son, who was then serving multiple state sentences for theft, to identify and prime inmate victims.
Once she had their information and property, Gallop forged powers of attorney naming her conspirators as attorneys in fact for the inmates.
Gallop and her co-conspirators used those documents to access and open inmate bank accounts, which they used to cash worthless checks, federal prosecutors said.
In the second fraud, according to court documents, Gallop recruited others to open bank accounts at several financial institutions.
She then used those accounts to negotiate checks she had stolen from the mail and elsewhere, ultimately disbursing the funds to herself in a variety of transactions. The total intended loss for both schemes exceeds $130,000.
Gallop’s co-conspirators:
- Delanio Vick, 32, Norfolk, will be sentenced May 14.
- Jessie Davis, 21, Portsmouth, will be sentenced June 14.
- Aaren Ivey, 22, Portsmouth, will be sentenced June 25.
- Gloria Vick, 60, Norfolk, is scheduled to stand trial July 10.
