SANTA ANA, Calif. (CN) — A special officer with the Orange County, California, Sheriff's Department pleaded guilty Wednesday to forging her elderly grandmother's signature on checks payable to herself and using her grandmother's credit card to party in West Hollywood and Las Vegas.
Roxana Laub, 33, entered a plea to one count of bank fraud and one count of identity theft according to a statement from the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles.
Although she faces a statutory sentence of as long as 30 years in prison for the bank fraud conviction alone, prosecutors agreed as part of the plea deal to ask the judge to impose a sentence at the low end of the applicable guidelines, which could mean she'll serve no more than 21 months in custody.
Laub work for the sheriff's department has included being a uniformed correctional officer at the Orange County jail. She is currently on administrative leave and she has agreed to pay back all the money she stole from her grandmother, according to her plea deal.
Starting in 2015, when her grandmother was 75, Laub began forging her grandmother's signature on checks from a Merrill Lynch bank account that Laub made out to herself. In all, she deposited $45,000 worth of fraudulent checks in her own bank account without her grandmother's knowledge or permission.
At one point in 2016, Laub called Merrill Lynch, posing as her grandmother to get information about the account. At some point during the call, Laub admitted to the bank's representative that she wasn't her grandmother and handed her the phone. When the Merrill Lynch associate started to ask her grandmother about the recent checks written against the account, which she didn't know about, Laub took back the phone and changed the subject, telling the bank associate her grandmother wasn't well and couldn't get back on the call.
Starting in 2020, Laub also began using a credit card in her grandmother's name to pay for meals at restaurants in Santa Ana, California, and West Hollywood, California. She went on to use the card in the summer of 2021 at bars in West Hollywood and at a Las Vegas nightclub.
To pay the $14,000 in charges she racked up on the credit card, Laub used another of her grandmother's bank accounts, according to her plea agreement.
After being confronted by an aunt, Laub texted her "I don't want [grandmother] to suffer," and "I know what I did is unforgivable."
In these messages Laub also promised to pay back all the money she had stolen from her grandmother but, according to the plea agreement, she hasn't done so yet. The total amount of restitution Laub owns her grandmother and Merrill Lynch could be as high as $68,000 but the final amount could change, according to the plea agreement.
Laub's federal public defender didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
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