Woman Charged in Noah Pozner Fundraising Fraud
Image by courtesy of pozner family
A Bronx woman has been hit with federal fraud charges for soliciting donations in the name of Newtown rampage victim Noah Pozner, federal prosecutors announced today.
Nouel Alba, 37, of the Bronx, N.Y., was charged with lying to FBI agents in connection with their investigation into a fraudulent fundraising scheme related to the Newtown school shooting tragedy.
On Dec. 21, NBC reported on Alba’s alleged involvement in a scam soliciting donations for Noah Pozner’s family over Facebook.
In an interview with NBC’s Rossen Reports program on the Today show, Alba denied posing as an aunt of Noah and sending messages requesting donations. She claimed someone else had used her Facebook account to send the messages and said she had refunded the donation money she received.
The federal criminal complaint alleges that Alba lied when she told the same story to FBI special agents.
If convicted of making false statements to federal agents, Alba faces a maximum term of imprisonment of five years and a fine of up to $250,000, the Connecticut U.S. Attorney’s office said in a statement.
Noah’s relatives are outraged by the scam.
“It’s trying to turn a profit on a horrible tragedy, on the death of kids, 6-year-old kids, 7-year-old kids,” his uncle Alexis Haller told NBC. “And to me, that’s just a horrible thing to be doing.”
Noah Pozner is one of 20 students killed on Dec. 14 at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown. Suspected gunman Adam Lanza killed 27 people in all before turning a gun on himself, authorities said.
The Pozner family is raising money on its official noahpozner.org web site.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
