Former Bank Employee Sentenced to Prison
Rebecca Dawn Long Embezzled Almost Half-A-Million Dollars

United States Attorney Julia C. Dudley announced today that Rebecca Dawn Long, age 36, of Jonesville, Virginia, was sentenced yesterday, in the United States District Court for the Western District of Virginia in Big Stone Gap, to charges stemming from her embezzlement of $487,685.00 from The Peoples Bank in Lee County, Virginia.

At the conclusion of today’s sentencing hearing, Chief United States District Judge James P. Jones rejected Long’s request for probation and sentenced her within the advisory guideline range to imprisonment for a term of 41 months. He also ordered her to make full restitution to the Peoples Bank.

Long pled guilty, on January 27, 2009, without the benefit of a plea agreement, to all charges in a five-count indictment issued in October 2008, -- bank fraud, bank embezzlement, money laundering, making a false statement on a loan document and engaging in a monetary transaction in criminally derived property of a value greater than $10,000.

Long, who was an employee of The Peoples Bank at the time of the offense, admitted that in 2004 she established a line of credit under a fictitious name. After establishing the false credit line, Long withdrew $487,685.23 over a period of approximately four years. In 2008, in an attempt to keep her crime hidden, Long created a fraudulent loan document and faxed it to an office of The Peoples Bank.

The investigation of this case was conducted by Federal Bureau of Investigation Special Agent Thomas Snapp. Assistant United States Attorney Randy Ramseyer prosecuted the case for the United States.