A Tennessee woman is serving 51 months in prison for attempting to cash a fraudulent $1 million bill of exchange from a foreign source. The bill of exchange was flagged because it didn’t have magnetic ink coding like an ordinary check, it contained an “autograph” line instead of a signature line, and wording at the bottom of the document contained the misspelled word “neogotobile.” A private investigator at the bank alerted the police that the bill of exchange was fraudulent. Just prior to the bank fraud incident, she had also filed a fraudulent tax return claiming a $250,000 refund. At trial, it was revealed that in 2006 she had been convicted of multiple counts of filing fraudulent returns using personal information stolen through Sheep Ministries, Inc., the faith-based nonprofit that she ran. (United States v. Marilyn Cook (May 6, 2022) U.S. Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit, Case No. 20-5622)
