A Virginia woman who created and sold millions of dollars worth of fraudulent coupons has been behind bars for years. Some of her most enthusiastic fans have themselves been imprisoned for months. Now, her top customer has just been sentenced to join them all behind bars, for participating in one of the country’s largest and most notorious counterfeit coupon schemes.
40-year-old Sherise Williams of Palmetto, Florida was sentenced today to 41 months in prison and ordered to pay $966,067 in restitution for purchasing and using hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of coupons that prosecutors said she knew were counterfeit – and selling the products she purchased with those coupons even while awaiting her sentencing.
Williams is the last, and the most voracious, customer of Lori Ann Talens to be sentenced. Talens created some 13,000 counterfeit coupons and sold them online, causing more than $31 million in losses to more than 100 different companies.
Talens was convicted and sentenced for fraud back in 2021. Four of her top five customers were later sentenced for fraud as well.
But “no other individual in this scheme purchased as many coupons or paid as much money to Lori Ann Talens” as Williams, prosecutors told the court. Over a period of three years, she made purchases 274 separate times, paying a total of $19,821.34 for Talens’s counterfeit creations.
The Coupon Information Corporation said Williams had been selling products purchased with counterfeit coupons online, for more than a decade. As the administrator of a Facebook group called “All House Hold Goods for Cheap,” the CIC said Williams posted images like the ones shown above, depicting roomfuls and trunkfuls of household products offered for sale at a fraction of their regular price.
“Criminals who use counterfeit coupons are generally more interested in converting the ‘value’ of the counterfeits into cash than the products themselves,” CIC Executive Director Bud Miller explained to the court. “One of the most common methods to cash in is to sell the products stolen with counterfeit coupons via flea markets, garage sales, and online venues.”
The last post in the group was just last month, more than a year and a half after Williams was charged with fraud. “Not even a federal prosecution with the threat of significant incarceration has dissuaded the defendant from participation in coupon fraud,” prosecutors informed the court, arguing that her “continued involvement in this fraudulent space demonstrates the need for a significant sentence of incarceration.”
Williams suggested a sentence of one year of imprisonment followed by home confinement and probation would be appropriate. Given that she “is not a person of great financial means,” her attorney told the court, “it is easy to see how Miss Williams would be encouraged and attracted to schemes that saved money or helped her make ends meet for her family.” He went on to argue that “nothing in this case involves weapons, drugs of any kind, any type of violence, no malicious behavior, no threats nor any risk of physical or emotional harm to others,” and that it was merely “a financial crime with a minimally ascertainable loss to a few corporate victims, who may have otherwise been unaware of the scheme.”
Williams also argued against the government’s calculation of the financial losses she caused, admitting only to $178,193.85 in losses, compared to the $991,067 that prosecutors said she was responsible for.
Prosecutors, however, requested a much harsher sentence of six years. “This was an ongoing fraud scheme that the defendant participated in for multiple years and only stopped when investigative agents executed a search warrant on the Talens residence in 2020 and put a stop (to) the fraud ring,” they noted. Williams also has “a long history of fraud and fraud related activities,” including several convictions for theft and larceny. The CIC said she first came to their attention when police found counterfeit coupons in her possession after she “was arrested on felony charges for stabbing an individual.”
Those charges were later dropped. But Williams’s “criminal history paints a troubling portrait of an individual with a deeply ingrained fraud mentality,” prosecutors argued. She “has demonstrated for nearly 20 years that she will steal and commit fraud related offenses when opportunities arise and the crime suits her. Numerous prosecutions and convictions have done nothing to dissuade her.”
Williams argued that her co-defendants were sentenced to an average of 13 months behind bars, so she should be treated similarly. But prosecutors countered that the coupons in this case “generated over $31 million in losses and the person who is most responsible for that, aside from Talens, is defendant Williams.” She “used these coupons to stockpile merchandise and resell it for profit,” and a lengthy sentence sends “a message to the community at large that fraud schemes such as these will not be tolerated.”
The sentence handed down by the court ended up being much closer to what the prosecution sought than what Williams had hoped.
“This marks the first time multiple buyers of counterfeit coupons have been convicted of felonies and sentenced to prison, and it will not be the last,” Miller said after the sentencing. He pointed out that Talens cooperated with law enforcement in the investigation of her former customers, and her cooperation helped hold them to account.
The CIC reminded anyone tempted by too-good-to-be-true coupons that they “can avoid counterfeit coupons by getting real coupons from legitimate sources such as newspapers, direct mail, and authorized websites. Paying money to so-called coupon fairies creates a risk of receiving counterfeit or stolen coupons.”
With Talens, her estranged husband and accomplice, and her five top customers now in prison, Williams’s sentencing brings this notorious case to a close. And the message to others who purchase counterfeit coupons is clear: those who create and sell counterfeits may be held responsible for their own crimes. But they also have customer lists, which makes it easy for law enforcement to track those customers down. Counterfeit coupon purchasers may initially get away with committing fraud at the checkout – but if the law gets involved, they may not get away with it for long.
