Ex-Housing Authority Official Must Pay Restitution for Federal Fraud Crime

A former housing manager was recently sentenced and ordered to pay $17,543.92 in restitution and sentenced to five years of federal probation, including six months of home detention, for altering a postal money order and embezzling more than $28,000 from the Charleston-Kanawha Housing Authority (CKHA).

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of West Virginia, the former manager had been employed by CKHA since 2006 and was serving as a housing manager in 2018. As a housing manager, her duties included collecting tenant rental payments and forwarding them to the CKHA accounts clerk. On Jan. 10, 2018, she received a $235 postal money order from a CKHA tenant intended for rental payment. She admitted to adding her own name to the postal money order to make it appear as though she was the intended beneficiary of the payment, and then deposited the money order into her personal checking account.

The former manager further admitted that from 2007 to 2018, she used her position as a CKHA housing manager to embezzle $28,523.30. As part of this scheme, she altered money orders she received from tenants attempting to pay dues that they owed CKHA and deposited the altered money orders into her personal checking account [U.S. v. McDaniel, February 2023].