A North Little Rock woman who pleaded guilty to bank fraud was sentenced to six months in federal prison Wednesday and ordered to pay more than $75,000 restitution to a non-profit she worked for.
Seanta L. Hammonds was indicted in 2019 by a federal grand jury on 13 counts of bank fraud in a scheme that resulted in the theft of nearly $66,000 from Children's Advocacy Centers of Arkansas, a nonprofit where she was employed as an operations coordinator.
According to court documents, U.S. District Judge Brian Miller, in addition to the prison sentence, ordered her to pay $75,219 in restitution and a $100 special assessment. He ordered her to self-report to the facility designated by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons on Aug. 8.
In addition, Hammonds was ordered to serve three years on supervised release after she leaves prison.
According to the indictment, Hammond's duties included bookkeeping, making bank deposits and general office-manager duties, and she used her access to the centers' QuickBooks account to issue 39 unauthorized checks, totaling $65,846, to herself between October 2017 and October 2018.
The indictment said she used the program to generate checks made payable to herself, then printed the checks and forged the signature of an authorized signatory on the centers' bank account without the signatory's knowledge.
The indictment said she cashed one of the fraudulent checks and deposited the others into her personal bank account, then deleted the unauthorized checks in the QuickBooks program to avoid detection.
On April 19, 2021, Hammonds pleaded guilty to one count of bank fraud contained in a superseding information in exchange for the original indictment's dismissal. Information as to how the fraud was discovered was not contained in the original indictment or the superseding information.