Jerseyville woman gets prison for wire fraud involving Alton business

EAST ST. LOUIS – A Jerseyville woman is going to prison and must repay hundreds of thousands of dollars she defrauded from her Alton employer.

U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Illinois Steve Wigginton said Stacy Jo Kanallakan, 35, was sentenced on Friday in United States District Court in East St. Louis, Illinois on a one-count information charging that she engaged in a scheme to commit wire fraud.

The district court sentenced Kanallakan to serve 33 months in federal prison, to be followed by three years mandatory supervised release. The district court ordered Kanallakan to pay $442,211.91 in restitution to her former employer. The court also ordered Kanallakan to pay a special assessment of $100.

At her plea on May 2, Kanallakan admitted that while working as the bookkeeper and accountant for Telsar Laboratories Inc., she fraudulently caused electronic deposits to be made to her own accounts and also caused fraudulent payments to be made to her by check out of TLI accounts.

Although the business is in Madison County, the wire communications utilized a bank in Brookfield, Wis., and Kanallakan admitted that between September of 2005 and October of 2011, she defrauded the business and its owner of $442,211.91.

The investigation was conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The case was prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorney Ranley R. Killian