An alleged brazen Orange County corporate embezzler may have committed the quickest whodunit in the history of the Orange County branch of the FBI.
Once special agents began to hunt their target weeks ago, the first major clue to her real name was a check the woman had given her employer for payroll deposit information when she took the job in March 2013.
Alma Edith Letona gained her accounting post at Roth Staffing Companies in the City of Orange near The Block by using an alias, Olga Figueroa, and though she'd handwritten the fake name on the Navy Federal Credit Union banking instrument, a simple examination under bright light showed Letona's name printed underneath her scribbling, according to the FBI.
This month inside the Ronald Reagan Federal Courthouse, the agency filed criminal charges against Letona and U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) lawyers filed forfeiture papers to take control of two properties they claim she purchased in Lake Forest with portions of $1.86 million in stolen funds.
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Roth Staffing hired Letona as a payroll tax accountant, and she created fake emails to mask diversions of huge lump sums as large as $283,000 into her own bank account in the fake name, according to the FBI.
Two months after Letona's termination due to attendance issues, company officials discovered the problem and notified law enforcement.
DOJ officials say in their court declaration that Letona's aliases may include Olga Iris Figuaroa, Olga Iris Manjang, Alma Olga Iris Manjama, Alma Olga Figueroa and Andrea Elizabeth Letona.
The two-pronged federal action against the defendant will proceed during as-yet-to-be scheduled hearings in Santa Ana.
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Email: rs**********@oc******.com. Twitter: @RScottMoxley.
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.