A former Washington Times circulation department employee has been charged in a scheme that stole nearly $100,000 by generating hundreds of paychecks for “ghost” carriers and teenage hawkers.
Federal prosecutors charged 53-year-old Elizabeth L. Dura, of Waldorf, with bank fraud for the scheme they said she ran until 2008, shortly before the newspaper stopped using hawker and carrier contractors, charging documents said.
Dura, who also goes by the name Elizabeth Kallay, was charged by information last week, which typically means that a plea agreement is in the works because the document can only be filed with the permission of the defendant. Dura faces a maximum of 30 years in prison and will likely have to pay back the money.
According to the charging documents, Dura began working at The Washington Times in 1988 and was an assistant in the circulation department. She would receive payment information from the distribution managers of the Youth Hawker Program and independent carriers and enter the information into a computer to generate paychecks for the workers. She would then pick up the checks from the accounting department and distribute them back to the field managers.
About 2003, Dura hatched a plan to keep some of the money for herself, prosecutors said.
She began to obtain account numbers for people who no longer worked at the paper or who had never worked at the paper and requested paychecks in their names, according to charging documents. She picked the checks up from the accounting department and cashed them at liquor stores or deposited them into her bank accounts, prosecutors said. In each case, she forged the signature of the person named on the check, charging documents said.
Over five years, Dura generated more than 200 fraudulent Washington Times checks totaling more than $96,000.
In December, prosecutors interviewed former members of the Youth Hawker program and several told them that they got the summertime job through Dura. When the detectives showed them the cashed checks, the teenagers said the signatures were not theirs.
