Alaska Beat

Beauty queen scholar to change fraud plea

According to the Anchorage Daily News, Rachel Yould, a former Miss Anchorage and a Rhodes and Fulbright scholar, is scheduled on Thursday to change her plea to "guilty" in an intricate fraud case to be tried in Anchorage. Prosecutors charge Yould with nine counts of mail fraud and one of wire fraud, alleging she created a second legal identity to obtain student loans and then diverted some of the funds to a business and into offshore accounts. Each charge carries a 20-year maximum sentence, but without a criminal history, Yould's sentence likely won't approach that penalty. The picture of fraud prosecutors paint is way too complicated to go into here, but let it suffice to say that it reads like a movie script. Yould also faces a separate case of five counts of mortgage fraud involving an Anchorage condo; that trial is set to begin in August. Read much, much more, here. Then read "To Elsie" by the poet William Carlos Williams.

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