Donna Summerlin sentenced to four years for defrauding deaf and elderly people
Donna L. Summerlin, a Deaf woman from Indiana, was sentenced to four years in prison yesterday for a fraud scheme targeting deaf and elderly people, according to a release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Middle District of Pennsylvania.
I covered this case in previous news reports.
Summerlin was convicted in June 2021 by a jury of accepting over $1.2 million from over 100 victims that were mostly either elderly, deaf, or both elderly deaf people after giving them false promises of receiving large sums of money from a “deaf lottery” or a special government grant program. The victims were asked to send in prepayments of smaller but significant amounts of money for taxes and customs fees that were fictitious. When victims made a payment, they would be encouraged to make larger payments.
Prosecutors said Summerlin “worked as a ‘money mule’” for other fraudsters from 2012 to 2016 who lived in Nigeria and Great Britain.
She would receive money from people in the U.S. and sometimes from people in Canada and Australia and send the money to her co-conspirators and kept a portion for personal use. The worst-affected victim was a deaf elderly couple who lived in Pennsylvania who sent in their $500,000 life savings.
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The U.S. Attorney’s Office said after the four-year prison term, Summerlin will need to serve a two-year term of supervised release and pay $723,436 in restitution to victims of the fraud scheme.
I received a message from a deaf person who was in touch with another deaf person who went to the sentencing hearing. They told me that there was a deaf interpreter in the courtroom and that it lasted about an hour.
Last year I did an interview with one of the victims of Summerlin — Bruce Bowman, a Deaf man from Lakeland, Florida. Bowman said he lost $9,000 in 2010 after he made advance payments for what he thought was a $1 million payment from someone in Oregon.
https://www.dailymoth.com/blog/interview-with-victim-of-donna-summerlin