Mission Woman Sentenced for Wire Fraud

United States Attorney Brendan V. Johnson announced that a Mission, South Dakota woman convicted of wire fraud was sentenced on December 16, 2013, by U.S. District Court Judge Roberto A. Lange.

Clarice Brave, age 51, was sentenced to five months in custody, five months of home confinement, three years of supervised release, a $100 special assessment to the Federal Crime Victims Fund, $16,852.38 in restitution to Family Dollar, and $5,000 in restitution to Country Pride Cooperative.

Brave was indicted by a federal grand jury on July 17, 2013, for wire fraud, larceny, and making false statements to a federal agency. She pled guilty on September 9, 2013, to one count of wire fraud.

The conviction stems from incidents that occurred between August 1, 2012 and September 24, 2012, when Brave devised a rolling deposit scheme to obtain money from the Family Dollar in Mission, South Dakota. Brave took cash out of store deposit bags for personal use and delayed taking deposits to the bank until she had enough cash from successive days to make up the difference in the bags from which she took the cash. When Family Dollar management began to suspect Brave was rolling deposits, Brave was required to fax deposit tickets, the deposit log, and the store’s daily cash receipt totals to the Family Dollar’s Loss Prevention director in Shawnee, Kansas, on a daily basis. On September 21, 2012, Brave fraudulently persuaded a teller to issue five deposit tickets from the bank without depositing any cash into Family Dollar’s bank account. She then faxed the fraudulently obtained deposit tickets from Mission to Shawnee, Kansas, in an attempt to conceal the rolling deposit scheme.

As part of the plea agreement in the case involving Family Dollar, Brave agreed to pay $5,000 in restitution to Country Pride Cooperative. The case in which Brave was indicted on February 13, 2013, for allegedly taking money from Country Pride Cooperative was dismissed at sentencing.

The investigations were conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Rosebud Sioux Tribe Law Enforcement Services. The cases were prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Marie H. Ruettgers.

Brave must self-report to the U.S. Marshals Service on December 30, 2013, to begin serving her sentence.