Scamming a Jacksonville credit union will cost a repeat customer a 42-month prison sentence, a federal judge has decided in sentencing a woman who used stolen identities to pocket almost $75,000.
Abigail Payton “was engaging in [this] behavior all over the country,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Kelli Swaney told Chief U.S. District Judge Marcia Morales Howard during an April 20 hearing that also touched on frauds at a credit union in Fort Lauderdale and prison time in Kentucky.
Payton, 29, pleaded guilty in November 2025 to two counts of bank fraud and another two of aggravated identity theft involving accounts she opened at Community First Credit Union.
Peyton used doctored driver’s licenses for a woman from Texas and another from Georgia to open accounts at Jacksonville-based Community First in September 2023, according to her plea agreement.
She used the accounts to get two loans totaling $60,000 and spent $38,760 of that before the scam was discovered, court records show.
Payton was arrested in Kentucky in May 2024 with other fake IDs, bank statements and drugs in a stolen car, according to a sentencing memo her attorney filed in March.
Payton’s attorney had sought a sentence of 30 months ― just six months more than the two-year sentence a federal identity-theft law required serving on top of her time for bank fraud ― while Swaney asked for 60 months, or five years. The judge’s sentence was 42 months, which Payton asked to serve as close as possible to her family in Kentucky.
In addition to repaying money lost by Community First, Payton agreed to pay restitution of smaller amounts to other financial institutions, creating a total obligation of $73,817.
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Woman with fake IDs gets prison term for cheating Duval credit union
Reporting by Steve Patterson, Jacksonville Florida Times-Union / Florida Times-Union
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