(JTA) — A 26-year-old Israeli woman was arrested and charged with trying to cash a $1 million check from her 77-year-old husband’s account.
Lin Helena Halfon was arrested earlier this month and charged with money laundering, organized fraud and exploitation of an elderly person, The Tampa Bay Times reported. Her bail has been set at $1 million.
A Tampa Amscot branch refused to cash a $1 million cashier’s check last month. But a man from Orlando who was not named in the report was able to cash two smaller checks in New Jersey totaling $666,000.
Halfon’s husband, Tampa businessman Richard Rappaport, president of Panther Medical, at first told investigators who contacted him about the check that he would give her the benefit of the doubt and did not want her to be deported back to Israel. He later said that he felt like the victim of fraud and theft.
Halfon originally said that she sent the checks to her sister in Israel as an act of revenge after she argued with Rappaport. Rappaport initially told police that Halfon said she would return the checks.
Rappaport’s daughter Dayna Titus told investigators that no one in the family knew that he had married Halfon, who does not have a criminal record in Florida. They were married on Aug. 21 at a county clerk’s office in Sarasota. Titus told investigators that she “believed that Halfon was ‘conning’ Rappaport due to his age,” a police report said.
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