A Gardnerville woman serving time in Nevada prison was the subject of a 17-count federal indictment charging her with stealing more than $1.4 million by wire fraud, bank fraud, and aggravated identity theft.
Kami Elois Power, 54, was sentenced to 1-3 years in prison out of Douglas County District Court last July for being an ex-felon in possession of a firearm by a prohibited person.
Power is a 12-year resident of Carson Valley and never registered as an ex-felon as required by state law.
Court documents in the federal case accuse Power of embezzling the money between November 2019 and May 2023 while she worked as an office assistant at a family-owned construction company in South Lake Tahoe.
Power disguised more than $700,000 of these fraudulent transfers as payments made to vendors that the company worked with — under fake profiles she created in the names of real companies, as well as fake companies that resembled her own initials, such as “KEP Inc. Sale” and KPI,” according to an announcement by Acting U.S. Attorney Michele Beckwith.
“She disguised additional fraudulent transfers as payments for payroll or reimbursements,” Beckwith said. “Power also used the company’s credit card to make unauthorized personal purchases and paid down the balance of her own personal credit cards with the company’s money. Power used the stolen money to purchase property, luxury cars, ATVs, and a horse.”
Power was investigated by the FBI and the South Lake Tahoe Police Department.
During her July sentencing in Minden, attorneys said Power was under an active investigation in June 2023, which resulted in Douglas authorities realizing she hadn’t registered as an ex-felon.
As it turned out, she’d been convicted of a half-dozen felonies all related to the embezzlement of more than $700,000 from employers in California that ended up sending her to prison around the turn of the century.
If convicted of the new charges, Power faces a maximum statutory penalty of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine for each count of wire fraud, 30 years in prison and a $1 million fine for each count of bank fraud, and a mandatory two-year sentence for aggravated identity theft. Any sentence, however, would be determined at the discretion of the court after consideration of any applicable statutory factors and the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, which take into account a number of variables.
Power is incarcerated in the Florence McClure Women’s Correctional Center in Southern Nevada.