A 33-year-old Naples woman is accused of continuing a statewide bank fraud scheme while her boyfriend ran the operation from a federal prison upstate, court records revealed.
Roxanne M. Wilmath was booked into the Broward County Jail Tuesday and charged with obtaining property over $50,000 by fraud, according to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
The case dates back to 2014 when Dwayne Tyree Harris recruited more than a dozen co-conspirators – including Wilmath -- to open bank accounts, deposit counterfeit checks, then withdraw cash from the accounts before the banks were any wiser, the FDLE said.
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Seven financial institutions lost nearly $180,000.
Harris, 40, pleaded guilty to bank fraud, wire fraud, identity theft and related charges in 2018 and was sentenced to more than five years in Coleman federal prison northwest of Orlando, records show.
The scheme fell apart when agents raided an apartment at 530 S. Federal Highway in Fort Lauderdale in September 2018. It was leased to Angelica Breon Perry, 27, who was arrested in Lee County on unrelated charges in March.
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Investigators found card embossing equipment and hundreds of counterfeit credit cards, debit cards, blank corporate checks, cellphones, and fake driver’s licenses with pictures of Wilmath, Harris and Perry using other names, according to court records.
They also found notebook ledgers with personal and corporate information for identity theft, agents said.
Wilmath was charged in 2018 with helping Harris avoid imprisonment after his conviction by hiding out in the Fort Lauderdale apartment.
While in the Pinellas County Jail and Coleman prison, monitored recordings of phone calls and texts revealed Harris was still giving instructions to co-conspirators to keep the bank fraud scheme going, records showed.
Wilmath remains in the Broward County Jail on a $50,000 bond.
