Woman Admits To Embezzling Money Again, Sentenced To Prison

ELLICOTT CITY, MD — A Howard County woman has been sentenced after pleading guilty to embezzling $1.2 million from a real estate agency where she worked, followed by another $100,000 she embezzled from a new employer.

Between January 2020 and November 2023, Jennifer Tinker of Ellicott City defrauded the Keller Williams real estate agency where she worked at by transferring more than $1 million of company funds through wire transfers, Zelle payments, checks and ACH to her personal bank accounts. Tinker fraudulently embezzled funds from the real estate agency’s accounts that included its escrow, operating and commission accounts, prosecutors said. She used the money for vacations, to buy clothes, purses, five vehicles and Taylor Swift concert tickets.

Tinker hid the transfers by listing fake recipients on the wire transfer paperwork to make them appear legitimate. She then wired the stolen funds into her personal bank accounts. Between approximately February 2021 and November 2023, Tinker wired money to her personal accounts more than 90 times. Tinker also made false and fraudulent edits and entries into her employer’s internal accounting records to conceal the transfers, court documents showed.

However, despite Tinker promising a judge that she posed no financial risk to a nonprofit who hired her after she pleaded guilty, she embezzled another $100,000 from her latest employer, the BWI Business Partnership, according to Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Wenner. She told her attorney and a judge that she didn't handle money in her new job, The Banner reported.

Tinker never disclosed to the partnership that she’d been fired from her previous employer for embezzlement. She was allowed to keep working in order to repay what she embezzled from the real estate agency. The BWI Business Partnership supports economic development and transportation around the Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport.

Carolyn Jensen, 84, testified in court that she had to pull $400,000 out of her retirement accounts to help her son keep the Keller Williams real estate office open after the embezzlement, The Banner reported. BWI Business Partnership President Gina Stewart said in court that Tinker’s actions "jeopardized the nonprofit’s ability to secure grants and funding, and strained its tiny staff of four people" and that she "felt betrayed."

After violating her probation from the original embezzlement guilty plea, Tinker pleaded guilty in July to one court of wire fraud in a revised agreement with prosecutors.

U.S. District Judge Adam Abelson sentenced her to five years and 10 months in prison followed by three years of supervised release on several conditions, including that she not incur any new credit charges or open additional lines of credit. Tinker's federal public defender assigned to her case requested the judge send her client to a minimum security federal prison so she could seek mental health and substance abuse treatment, stating that Tinker has been diagnosed with several mental health issues including an impulse control disorder, The Banner reported.