In December 2010, a Sunset Beach woman got a terrible surprise when she went to a Huntington Beach branch of U.S. Bank to pay off her mortgage and discovered that three weeks earlier a stranger had emptied her account of more than $610,000.
According to court records, an FBI investigation determined that Zenobia Moore of Los Angeles used fake identification to withdraw the money from a U.S. Bank branch inside an Albertson’s market across the street from Mile Square Park and spent $580,000 of the money to purchase 402 gold coins.
Moore’s alleged gold deal was arranged at the Bella Terra Mall in Huntington Beach and then consummated inside an LA Denny’s, according to a Homeland Security report reviewed by OC Weekly.
Using surveillance camera’s inside the Albertson’s store, federal agents working with a Los Angeles Police Department detective matched Moore’s real California driver’s license with images of the scumbag who depleted the account, according to court records.
Following an April 4 arrest for bank fraud and aggravated identity theft, Moore–who was born in 1953–remains in custody without bail but with a taxpayer-funded defense lawyer.
Court records also show that Moore is suspected in a Las Vegas identity theft transaction in 2010.
A federal judge inside Orange County’s Ronald Reagan Federal Courthouse has not yet been assigned to her case.
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.
