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Marc Cheeseman, a 50-year-old Silverdale resident, was sentenced to five to seven years in a Pennsylvania state prison in a hearing on Thursday, Jan. 19, District Attorney Matthew Weintraub said in a statement.
Cheeseman previously pleaded guilty in September to several felony theft charges and one misdemeanor count of impersonating a veteran, the DA said.
In court, prosecutors argued that he carried on a yearslong scheme to bilk a Middletown family for their life savings. Beginning in 2017, authorities said Cheeseman presented himself as a former Marine and friend of his victims in need of some temporary financial help.
Specifically, investigators said Cheeseman told the couple he lived on pensions from the military and a carpenter's union, but that "his funds were frozen" and that he would need to pay in order to access his money.
To sell the con, officials said the phony Marine cooked up bogus documents and letters from the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of the Navy, the Bucks County Public Defender's Office, Bank of America, and the New Jersey Department of Taxation. The letters were later found to contain multiple spelling and grammatical errors, the DA noted.
Meanwhile, to assist the man they thought of as a friend, Cheeseman's victims took out cash advances on their credit cards, made wire transfers, wrote checks, pawned off jewelry, sold two of their classic cars, and took cash out of the family safe, authorities said.
They also loaned Cheeseman a pickup truck with an E-Z Pass, a favor he returned by racking up over $1,000 in unpaid tolls, the DA said.
In total, prosecutors believe the conman robbed his victims of $319,882.65 between June 2017 and November 2020.
The victims called police, who quickly determined that Cheeseman was never a member of any service branch. They also found that he'd lost about $167,000 at area casinos while taking money from his victims.
“You broke them,” President Judge Wallace H. Bateman Jr. at sentencing Thursday. “You stole not just their money, but you stole their future and their memories.”
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