Mail Fraud

A former Western Maryland principal was found guilty in federal court yesterday of stealing more than $18,000 from her school by using false invoices and keeping money from travel reimbursements. Diane L. McFarland, 52, of Frostburg was convicted on four counts of wire and mail fraud by a U.S. District Court jury. McFarland, who was principal of Cash Valley Elementary School in LaVale, never paid back teachers at her school for costs incurred during conference trips as part of the federally funded Success for All program.

Two Baltimore-area federal employees pleaded guilty yesterday to one count each of mail fraud and wire fraud for conspiring to steal more than $247,000 from the Social Security Administration in Woodlawn and the Goddard Space Center in Greenbelt. Franklin G. Thomas, 34, of Baltimore is to be sentenced Dec. 19; Andrea D. Harrison, 38, of Towson is to be sentenced Dec. 20. Prosecutors said Thomas, a benefit authorizer who processed payments to legal representatives for claimants at SSA, located people who did not have legal representation and instructed a computer to make payments totaling $52,500 to Harrison's bank account.

Two years after federal authorities began investigating a former state senator and a Baltimore construction company that received high-profile state jobs, one of the firm's former partners has been charged with mail fraud and tax evasion in U.S. District Court. The charges stem from a broader grand jury investigation of Poole and Kent Co. and its connection to former state Sen. Thomas L. Bromwell, who once chaired the Senate Finance Committee and resigned his seat in 2002 to become head of the state's Injured Workers Insurance Fund.

An Ohio man pleaded guilty yesterday to engineering a half-million dollar scam of local governments, including Baltimore, by impersonating a representative of city-approved vendors and persuading officials to send him replacement checks for ones issued to the companies. James Leroy Shorts, 34, of Shaker Heights, Ohio, was arrested in March and charged with 10 counts of mail fraud, wire fraud and money laundering related to allegations in Maryland. Prosecutors said the scheme cost Maryland $160,000.

Del. Tony E. Fulton, an 18-year veteran of the Maryland General Assembly who was known for taking on the political establishment and for tactics that at times raised ethical concerns, died Friday night of a cancer-related illness at Gilchrist Center for Hospice Care. He was 53. His wife of 29 years, Jacqueline Fulton, said that she, his two daughters, his brother and friends were at Mr. Fulton's side when he died at 10:30 p.m. A lifelong Democrat, Mr. Fulton frequently criticized his party for failing to deal effectively with drugs, crime and troubled schools in his native Baltimore.

A Westminster man pleaded guilty in federal court in Baltimore yesterday to mail fraud, a charge that stemmed from what prosecutors say was a scheme to flip properties in the city during the late 1990s. Anthony J. DiChiara, 41, was a licensed appraiser who prosecutors said agreed in 1998 to work with a mortgage broker trying to defraud mortgage lenders. Federal prosecutors said DiChiara took the broker's word on who owned properties and how much the properties were worth, although he never checked land records or went to the properties.

Marci De Vries, a Baltimore marketer, won't open her e-mail in front of clients, fearful that they'll think she's a pervert when they see some of the subject lines on her screen. Shamik Ghosh, a Laurel business developer, has to delete junk mail from his wife's account when she's out of town so the deluge of spam doesn't crash the inbox. And Deborah Tillet, president of a Hunt Valley gaming company, is so fed up with spam, she's considering not giving her e-mail address to "anyone ever again."

WASHINGTON - Sitting at his home in Virginia Beach, Joe Yuhasz almost reached for his wallet when an e-mail message popped into his inbox and told him America Online needed to verify his credit card information. The site linked to the e-mail looked identical to AOL's billing center, until Yuhasz noticed that the domain name was a fake - a scam commonly known as "phishing." Most people recognizing a possible fraud would have deleted the message and moved on. But Yuhasz, a cybercrime specialist for the FBI, had other plans.

Four men who bought and quickly resold scores of Baltimore houses in recent years were charged yesterday in federal court with defrauding mortgage lenders of between $1.5 million and $2.5 million. Federal prosecutors said in court papers that they expect the four defendants to plead guilty to the mail fraud charges. Charged in an alleged property flipping scheme were Darnell Acree, 49, of Owings Mills; Bryan P. Rosenberg, 39, of Lutherville; Glenn Rosofsky, 36, of Baltimore; and Henry Kimball, 38, a former Marylander living in California The two-count criminal information filed in U.S. District Court alleged that, "operating individually and through a number of corporations," the defendants carried on a fraud scheme over a three-year period ending in October last year.