Woman arrested for fraud, embezzlement

A Sherills Ford woman was arrested Tuesday on embezzlement and fraud charges for incidents involving over $90,000 and spanning more than two years.
Sharon Dieffenbach is charged with two counts of embezzlement, one count of financial card fraud and three counts of forgery and uttering. She was also indicted by the grand jury Tuesday on seven counts of obtaining property by false pretense.
The Lincolnton Police Department received a call on Jan. 19 from Southern Graphics and Marketing on East Main Street about a possible embezzlement, Detective Kameron Keener said.
Keener discovered through an investigation that Dieffenbach — who had been an employee there — had written numerous company checks to herself. The checks were found in a storage room by another employee, he said.
The business’s owner then obtained bank transactions from 2002 to 2004.
Keener said that during that time Dieffenbach had written checks totaling $41,334 to herself.
She also allegedly made numerous unauthorized purchases to record clubs, catalogs and restaurants with company checks and credit cards totaling $5,282, Keener said.
She also wrote a $20,000 check from one of the company’s departments and deposited it in another, Keener said.
The Police Department later received a call from a business out of New York reporting that Dieffenbach had charged $2,490 to one of its company credit cards.
That led to eight other businesses across the country filing reports against Dieffenbach for incidents from 2002 to early 2003, Keener said.
Dieffenbach got the credit card numbers while she was employed at Southern Graphics and Marketing, Keener said. The charges ranged from $676 to $9,103 and totaled $23,483.
Dieffenbach turned herself in to police Tuesday and has cooperated with the investigating, Keener said. She was released on bond.by Alice Smith