One woman authorities said is linked to $1.4 million stolen from the Clark County School District needed money for a church trip.
Another was trying to help a mysterious man who worked on an oil rig.
A third told authorities she really didn’t remember the money transfers she made.
The fourth?
She was in Las Vegas Justice Court this past week to answer charges that nearly four years ago, she received $190,000 of stolen school district money in an Oklahoma bank account. Jasmine Nelson, 32, told Justice of the Peace Noreen DeMonte she eventually plans to enter into a plea agreement in District Court to charges stemming from the multi-layered, complex theft from the school district and Southern Nevada taxpayers in 2022.
“Yes ma’amm,” Nelson said when asked by the judge if she intended to accept a plea deal offered by a prosecutor in the case.
CCSD Emails and a “malicious actor”
On Aug. 18, 2022, a representative of the school district filed a report stating the school district was the victim of a business email compromise crime, according to an arrest report for Nelson.
The school district, the Metropolitan Police Department said, was tricked into sending a $1.4 million payment meant for Boyd Martin Construction to a bank account controlled not by the company, but by a mysterious scammer posing as the business in emails.
“CCSD representatives explained that the BEC was committed by an attacker using domains similar to CCSD’s email domain,” the detective wrote, adding the attacker also used email domains that were similar to those used by Boyd Martin Construction.
The cyber attacker, it appeared, had “inside information” about the business relationship between the district and Boyd, police said. They tricked CCSD accounting personnel into sending funds that were supposed to go to Boyd to a Huntington National Bank account controlled by a “malicious actor” who perpetrated the crime via “sending emails back and forth between the legitimate and illegitimate domains,” police said.
Leslie Villarosa
Police obtained transaction information from the bank account the school district’s money was sent to. It led them, in turn, to a business account belonging to a Chicago woman, Leslie B. Villarosa, who was operating the receiving account as Villes Enterprise Inc. Bank records showed Villarosa received a deposit in the account from CCSD under the title “Boyd Martin Construction” on July 22, 2022. Villarosa then made 16 purchases for a little more than $2,100, withdrew $2,000 in cash and followed with a big one – a wire for $950,000 to a Selma Enterprises account with Chase Bank.
A day later, she withdrew $45,000, essentially “paying herself,” police said.
Villarosa sent $190,000 to an account under the name “Jordan Hensel Phelps Construction” to a bank in Oklahoma followed by a second wire to the Selma Enterprises account for $100,000. She then sent $95,000 to a Jennifer Walsh with a Chase account.
On Oct. 7, 2022, U.S. Secret Service special agents showed up at Villarosa’s apartment in Chicago. Agents spoke to her for about three hours about why she was receiving a huge amount of money from a school district in the desert some 1,700 miles away from Chicago.
“Villarosa told investigators she believed law enforcement would be knocking on her door any day and she had been fooled into sending money overseas for religious reasons,” police said.
Villarosa told investigators she’d met an someone on Facebook and sent the person she didn’t know money in what authorities described as a “romance scheme.”
In her statement to Secret Service agents Villarosa said she had help “from unknown individuals” in Texas to set up her Villes Enterprises account. Villarosa pleaded guilty to theft and conspiracy in June 2024 and received a suspended sentence of 12 to 36 months in prison and up to 24 months of probation. She was also ordered to pay $80,000 in restitution and perform 20 hours a month in community service.
Selma Redmond
Police said they learned from Chase Bank that the Selma Enterprises account that received school district money from Villarosa belonged to a Selma Jean Redmond, of Phoenix. A person controlling the account, police learned, sent $450,000 and $490,000 in July 2022 to cryptocurrency exchange Circle Internet Financial. The account was opened with just $100 on May 27, 2022. There was no activity until July 2022 when Redmond received a $120,000 bank wire from a company out of Colorado.
Redmond, police said, then received $950,000 in July 2022 and $100,000 in August 2022 from Villarosa in Chicago, police said.
“Redmond had several unexplained and seemingly unrelated wires, deposits and withdrawals enter and exit her account from July 2022 to August 2022 that totaled $1,204,986,” police said.
About $1m was sent to a cryptocurrency exchange, while $69,600 was sent to her savings account, police said.
Police said large amounts were sent to now defunct cryptocurrency exchange FTX and others including Coinbase and Binance.
Police said Redmond sent 50 bitcoin to three bitcoin addresses and the majority of the transactions were “directly attributable to CCSD’s stolen funds.”
By the time police were able to check one cryptocurrency account it had only $9,000 left in it. The user’s login locations all came from Africa, “primarily Ghana and Nigeria,” police said.
Binance told law enforcement their account that Redmond sent money to was controlled by an individual based out of Nigeria. The controller of this account “had already exchanged the funds for another cryptocurrency and quickly sent them out through another blockchain,” police said.
A website linked to Selma Enterprises, police said, had an email address connected to an individual logging in from an IP address in Lagos, Nigeria.
Police interviewed Redmond at her home in Phoenix.
“Agents were instructed to ask Redmond about the funds she received from Villarosa, but she answered nearly every question with ‘I can’t recall that’ or ‘I can’t say,” police said.
District Court records show Redmond pleaded guilty to two conspiracy charges and received a suspended sentence of 364 days in the Clark County Detention Center. She was placed on probation for up to one year.
Jennifer Walsh
Police followed up on the $95,000 Villarosa sent to the Jennifer Walsh Chase bank account. Walsh agreed to speak with investigators at her place of employment in Indianapolis and said she’d met an individual on Facebook in the Summer of 2021 who went by the name “Victor Bronx.”
“Walsh stated Bronx claimed to work on an oil rig and admitted she never met Bronx in person,” police said.
Police said Walsh acknowledged receiving $95,000 from Villarosa and that she was helping Bronx by receiving and withdrawing the funds, then sending them t0 a Bitcoin ATM in Indiana located at a truck stop.
Walsh pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges and received a suspended 364-day jail sentence.
Jasmine Nelson
Authorities believe Nelson is the woman who opened up an account at the Bank of Oklahoma Financial in 2022 under the name “Jordan Hensel Phelps Construction.”
Police say on July 21, 2022, the account received $190,000 of the school district’s money in the account.
While Nelson’s co-defendants in the case were quickly arrested, prosecuted and convicted, Nelson was not brought to Southern Nevada to face charges until recently .
“This is the last co-defendant that we’ve been looking for for a couple years,” said Clark County Chief Deputy District Attorney Austin Beaumont. “She was located in Texas and extradited here to answer for her charges here.”
Nelson, against the advice of her public defender, said in court she wants to accept a plea agreement offer to one count of conspiracy to commit theft and one count of conspiracy to commit financial transaction to evade reporting. She is scheduled to enter her plea to those charges in District Court this month and could back out of the deal if she chooses.
But who organized all of this? Who are the foreign actors in Africa who it appears were commanding some of these women to do their bidding?
“That I can’t comment on at this time,” Beaumont said.
Beaumont said in court, however, that if Nelson were to accept the plea deal, she has to identify all codefendants in pleadings, pay restitution to the school district, and sign a confession of judgement to CCSD.
Karren Kenney, a certified fraud examiner and attorney in California, said the type of crime committed against the school district is a common one for sophisticated fraudsters.
“This type of online activity is becoming so much more prevalent internationally,” she said.
She said what happened to the district should be a lesson for both public sector and business leaders.
“Somehow they get in to the email system, hacking it or however they obtain information, being able to watch peoples’ emails,” she said. “If there are things like some huge payment that is supposed to be due, they convince someone to change the banking information.”
Kenney said businesses should have a process in place where accounting personnel call contractors to verify any requests to change banking information. There should also be more than one person involved if such a request is received.
The School District said in an email it is deferring requests for comment to prosecutors in the case out of respect for the legal process.
Contact Glenn Puit at gpuit@reviewjournal.com
