Earlier this year, a Missouri woman conjured up a plan to fraud the family of Elvis Presley family out of their ownership of his iconic home, Graceland, but her scheme has now been all shook up. On Friday (August 16), the U.S. Department of Justice announced that the would-be fraudster has been arrested, and is now facing a possible two-decade prison sentence.
The scam began when 53-year-old Lisa Jeanine Findley allegedly falsified loan documents, posing as three different people and forging the signatures of a notary public and Lisa Marie Presley in an effort to claim that Elvis’ late daughter had used Graceland as collateral on a $3.8 million dollar loan, which she “defaulted” on before her untimely passing last year.
From there, Findley filed a false creditor’s claim with the Superior Court of California, and a false deed of trust with the Shelby County Register’s Office in Tennessee, and published a fraudulent foreclosure notice in a Memphis newspaper, claiming that the property would go to auction on May 23rd.
Thankfully, the auction was halted after Lisa Marie’s daughter, Riley Keough — who is now the trustee of Promenade Trust, which controls Graceland — won a court order to block it. In a statement, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Nicole M. Argentieri described Findley’s plot as a “brazen scheme,” and alleged that “the defendant created numerous false documents and sought to extort a settlement from the Presley family.”
Now, Findley is facing prison time — up to 20 years for mail fraud and a mandatory minimum of two years for aggravated identity theft. She made her first court appearance on Friday, and allegedly wrote an explanation to the court, the Presley family, and media, claiming that the true perpetrator in the Graceland plot is an identity thief based in Nigeria.