WHEELING, W.Va. – The former assistant manager of defunct N&W Poca Division FCU on Thursday was sentenced to more than four years in prison for her role in a family fraud that drained as much as $5 million from the tiny credit union.
Rebecca Poe, 36, pleaded guilty to charges in February along with her cousin Pamela Mullins, a teller at the Bluefield, W.Va., credit union that was chartered in 1970 to serve employees of the Norfolk and Western Railway.
The credit union’s president Deborah Bailey, who is Poe’s mother and Mullins’ aunt, has not been named in the criminal case but was charged in a civil suit brought by NCUA with engineering the scheme. NCUA claims Bailey, her husband and their daughters stole the money by making fake deposits into their accounts and manipulating phony loans.
Poe pleaded guilty stealing $2.4 million by various schemes, including the creation of fictitious deposits into her account and accounts of family members. The deposits were fictitious in that no funds were received by the credit union to support the deposits.
She also took money through credit union loans and posted fictitious payments to the loan accounts without the credit union receiving money.
Poe further took money from the credit union by issuing official checks from the credit union to herself and family members, as well as to third parties, to pay for her expenses without recording these checks in the books and records of the credit union.
Mullins, 46, pleaded guilty and is scheduled to be sentenced on Sept. 19.
