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On Thursday, May 4, 50-year-old New Hyde Park resident Elizabeth Reilly pleaded guilty to grand larceny charges, the Nassau County District Attorney announced.
Reilly’s employer was a Floral Park attorney who had verbally agreed to handle a 91-year-old woman’s finances while she executed her Power of Attorney, Living Will, and more with him, the DA’s Office reported.
- Earlier Report: New Hyde Park Woman Indicted For Theft Of Almost $750K, DA Says
According to the investigation, the law office then became the mailing address for the victim’s banks, as part of the agreement.
This meant Reilly had access to the victim’s bank statements, checkbooks, credit cards, and more.
For four years (from 2016 to 2020), Reilly allegedly wrote more than 250 checks from the victim’s bank account, all of them made out to Reilly herself or cash. She would then deposit said checks into her or her husband’s bank account.
The deposited checks alone totaled more than $675,000, the DA said.
Reilly also purportedly used the victim’s credit card information to buy herself airline tickets, beauty products, a gym membership, and more. To pay the credit card balances she ran up, she used the victim’s bank account.
On top of that, she would make purchases using her own PayPal account, the investigation claimed, and then would pay her account with the victim’s credit card.
Reilly was caught when her employer reviewed suspicious account activity.
“At an advanced age, the victim knew it made fiscal sense to trust her finances to her attorney,” District Attorney Anne T. Donnelly said in a statement.
“She couldn’t have predicted that the defendant, who was given access to her bank statements, checkbooks, and credit cards, would look at her life’s savings as a convenient payday,”
She pleaded guilty to a charge of Grand Larceny in the second degree and is due back in court on Friday, July 7.
It is expected that Reilly will be sentenced to three to six years behind bars.
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