A man who stole at least $24 million in checks with his postal worker girlfriend and another woman will spend 4 1/2 years in federal prison, a judge ruled Thursday.
As a 27-year-old, Donnell Gardner was involved in a 2023 scheme where the trio posted $12 million in stolen checks to “OG Glass Ceiling,” an online channel on the Telegram app.
There, people could buy the checks to cash them or try to replicate them, prosecutors said Thursday in U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina.
The scheme “violated the fundamental expectation of safety” in the United States Postal Service, they said. Gardner’s girlfriend and USPS worker Nakedra Shannon, 29, would steal the checks from the mail, and Desiray Carter, 24, would post them online after Gardner redacted some information, according to court documents.
When someone bought the check, they would get the unredacted version. The group made hundreds of thousands of dollars in the scheme, which lasted from April 2023 to July 2023. Officers arrested them in November.
