Real Estate Broker Steals over $500,000 from Several Clients
A Santa Cruz real estate broker has been on the run from authorities after she was accused of stealing over $500,000 from her clients in 2007. 56-year-old Louisa Katrina Dubinsky faces 39 counts of embezzlement of funds as well as financial elder abuse and writing bad checks from at least one person’s account. Dubinsky is being accused of writing at least four bad checks to two separate people.
Two checks were written to one person totaling $726,564 and two other checks written to another person totaling $375,000. Several other victims found hundreds of thousands of dollars missing from their accounts as a result of bad checks from Dubinsky. Some of the victims in this incident reportedly lost their entire life savings as a result of Dubinsky’s actions.
Embezzlement and other types of white-collar crime are often difficult to pursue because corporate entities or individual people committing these crimes are able to hide their activities very well. The only way it can be stopped is if somebody reports suspicious bank activity and authorities are able to link it to a specific person. In this incident, since Dubinsky has been able to evade police up to now, she has successfully gotten away with hundreds of thousands of dollars from the people she stole from. Unfortunately, this is the case for many other financial crime victims as well. People often lose a fortune because they are unaware of any illegal activity occurring in their bank accounts or they believe their money is being handled properly and legally when it may not be.
