GREENBELT, MD—A Gaithersburg woman was sentenced to 12 years in prison after she and a co-defendant promised to eliminate debt, but instead took people’s money.

Mary Ann Mendoza, 51, and Willie Lamont Hicks, 52, told people they could discharge mortgage, credit card, and car loan debt for them, but only if they paid a percentage of their outstanding debt to them.

Mendoza and Hicks, who claimed to be an attorney, used people’s personal information to mail fraudulent documents to creditors and the IRS. They received more than $1 million in cash and other payments from their victims.

The two were convicted of wire fraud, mail fraud, and conspiracy in October 2023. On February 23, 2024, Mendoza was sentenced to 12 years in prison and ordered to pay $981,293.07 in restitution.

Mendoza and Hicks’s scheme took people’s money and left them with nowhere to turn. Many of them went into debt, had their credit cards repossessed, and had their homes foreclosed on.

“As a result of Mendoza’s and Hicks’ scheme, victims suffered substantial financial harm, including foreclosure and eviction, homelessness, depletion of their retirement savings, significant downgrading of their credit scores, bankruptcy, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees and penalties owed to the IRS as a result of the fraudulent paperwork mailings,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Maryland said in a statement.

This article was written with the assistance of AI and reviewed by a human editor.

Photo by Sora Shimazaki from Pexels