A Cedar Falls office manager has been locked up for a two-year embezzlement scheme that drained $250,000 from her employer. Teresa Mae Chiappone, 57, of Waterloo, Iowa, pleaded guilty to wire fraud and was sentenced on May 2, 2024, to 27 months in federal prison.
Chiappone, who has been known by several aliases including Teresa Mae Combs, Hughes, and King, admitted to embezzling the funds between September 2020 and September 2022 while working as office manager for a local small business. She wrote unauthorized checks totaling over $160,000, intercepted cash deposits of at least $50,000, and made unauthorized credit card charges in excess of $3,000.
Her criminal activities reached its peak at Iowa casinos, where she gambled away thousands of dollars that belonged to the small business. The company was forced to take out a loan to cover the losses and incurred additional expenses for a forensic audit by a local accounting firm and maxing out its credit line at a local bank.
The sentence, handed down by United States District Court Chief Judge C.J. Williams in Cedar Rapids, also includes a fine of $1,000 and an order to pay $255,639.16 in restitution to the victim and its insurance company. Chiappone must serve a three-year term of supervised release following her prison term.
Chiappone is scheduled to surrender to the Bureau of Prisons at a later date. The case was prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorney Timothy L. Vavricek and investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with assistance from the Cedar Falls Police Department.
Court records for this case can be accessed at https://ecf.iand.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/login.pl, under case file number 23-CR-2047. Follow the United States Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Iowa on Twitter @USAO_NDIA for more updates.
RELATED: Cedar Falls Office Manager Gets 2+ Years for $250K Wire Fraud Scheme
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Key Facts
- State: Iowa
- Agency: DOJ USAO
- Category: Fraud & Financial Crimes|Public Corruption|White Collar Crime
- Source: Official Source ↗
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