Lady who perpetuated the scheme pleads guilty
I just don’t understand what she thought would happen. How did she decide this was a way to actually physically come out ahead?
Can anyone explain the logic behind how she would decide to fake a loan, than actually hold an auction at the courthouse and somehow get money without getting caught?
I would assume they were hoping that Lisa Marie’s estate would either pay her $3.8m or allow her to start auctioning things off.
This woman claimed that Lisa Marie took out a loan from her. She had ‘proof’ and probably assumed the estate wouldn’t dig into the claim.
The “attempted foreclosure” section of Graceland’s Wikipedia article should be of interest.
In short: she either underestimated the target or the whole thing was masterminded by someone else.
Real estate fraud is a recognized problem. If it didn’t work at least occasionally, people would stop doing it.
Her mistake was in not having good enough (fake) documents to stand up to someone with the resources to fight her.
https://www.canada.ca/en/financial-consumer-agency/services/real-estate-fraud.html
Also in the ‘that probably didn’t help’ department was choosing a target that, if their property were to be auctioned off, even legitimately, would be worldwide news.
My guess would be that she was less ambitious than that: that her plan was to announce the auction like someone who has a valid claim would, and get confronted, and say well, I have documentation, and get told uh, a jury will probably say that’s fake, at which point you get nothing, and she’d reply but there’s a chance they’ll believe it’s authentic, in which case I get everything, and they’d reply gosh, you’re right; maybe we keep everything, but maybe we lose everything; how about we pay you a fraction of it to settle this out of court?
I mean, yeah, even with sights set that low it was still a silly idea; but I think that was the idea.
The Wikipedia article said the perpetrator has succeeded in the scam a few times in Oklahoma, certainly with victims of much less substantial resources and notoriety. So going for the big score was certainly the first mistake.
Like the dog that’s good at catching cats and decided to try catching a car.