For five years, a Maryland woman with bookkeeping and accounting positions at small companies lived like a celebrity. She lounged in Las Vegas penthouse suites, sported designer handbags and shelled out nearly $5,000 to see Taylor Swift from the stadium floor during her Eras Tour.
Then she got caught.
On Monday, Jennifer Tinker, a 42-year-old Ellicott City resident, was sentenced to nearly six years in prison for embezzling more than $1 million from a real estate company and a nonprofit where she was an employee, as first reported in the Banner.
For five years, a Maryland woman with bookkeeping and accounting positions at small companies lived like a celebrity. She lounged in Las Vegas penthouse suites, sported designer handbags and shelled out nearly $5,000 to see Taylor Swift from the stadium floor during her Eras Tour.
Then she got caught.
On Monday, Jennifer Tinker, a 42-year-old Ellicott City resident, was sentenced to nearly six years in prison for embezzling more than $1 million from a real estate company and a nonprofit where she was an employee, as first reported in the Banner.
The scheme began in 2020, when Tinker was working as a market center administrator at a small real estate company, making $90,000 annually handling accounts receivable, accounts payable and paying commissions. In January of that year, she began directing money from her employer’s escrow accounts, operating accounts and commission accounts into her personal bank accounts, according to court records. She started out making transfers through Zelle, check and ACH payments. By 2021, she had switched to wiring the money to fictitious recipients. On paperwork, she listed the recipients as “MD Homes LLC,” “Escrow Release” and “Main Homes.” The destination for those 90 transfers was her personal bank account.
Tinker spent the money at Louis Vuitton and Balenciaga and purchased five cars, including a Mazda MX-5 Miata and a Toyota Tacoma, according to court records. She also booked a five-day stay for her and her husband at Disney’s Caribbean Beach resort and bought floor tickets to a Luke Bryan concert.
In November 2023, her supervisors discovered her scheme, according to court records. She was fired and admitted to both her supervisor and later to federal law enforcement that she had been stealing money. Within six months of leaving the real estate company, Tinker was hired as a bookkeeper at a nonprofit, from which she also embezzled, and spent lavishly on items including $3,000 on purchases from the Bonnaroo Music Festival. She stole more than $100,000 from the nonprofit. The real estate company and the nonprofit were not named in court records.
“For five years, her employers’ bank accounts were Tinker’s personal ATMs,” the U.S. attorney’s office wrote in court documents.
Tinker’s attorney through the federal public defender’s office, Anjali Biala, and the Assistant U.S. Attorney prosecuting the case, Joseph L. Wenner, did not respond to requests for comment.
In victim impact statements, employees at the two companies said they felt Tinker had violated their trust. One of the partners at the real estate company needed to injected $400,000 of personal money into the company to keep it running, according to court records. Employees and managers there reported adverse impacts to their health as they needed to spend hundreds of hours fielding complaints from customers and real estate agents whose funds were lost in escrow.
The nonprofit Tinker worked at afterward suffered similarly. With fewer than four full-time employees, the company had little financial wiggle room. Insurance coverage spared them needing to take drastic measures. The organization has had to assure funders that it’s still deserving of grants, the U.S. attorney’s office representatives wrote in court filings.
“There was no substance abuse or addiction that fueled her spending spree. There were no unfunded medical treatments that put Tinker in dire financial straits. There was simply Tinker’s own greed, her capability for deceit, and her desire to live beyond her means,” lawyers from the U.S. attorney’s office wrote.
The court sentenced her to 70 months in prison — with credit for time served since Feb. 13 — and ordered her to pay back about $1.2 million.
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