Woman who staged a fake abduction pleads guilty to new fraud charges

Bonnie Sweeten pleaded guilty Tuesday to fraud — again.

Sweeten, 51, admitted to stealing just under $150,000 from a friend who hired her after her last conviction to give her a second chance. Clutching a tissue and speaking softly, she entered her plea in a nearly empty federal courtroom, drawing far less attention than when she tried to pull off a racially charged hoax in 2009.

She drew national headlines at that time when she called 911 and claimed to have been carjacked along with her 9-year-old daughter. Sweeten, who is white, told the dispatcher she had been abducted in Bucks County by two Black men and was calling from the trunk of the kidnappers’ Cadillac.

The FBI found her the next day — in Disney World with her daughter.

Prosecutors said Sweeten concocted the lie to somehow obscure her theft of $280,000 from a 92-year-old man with dementia. She booked her plane tickets to Orlando under someone else’s name. The judge in that case called her a “calculating, manipulative, cold-blooded woman.”

After pleading guilty in the hoax, Sweeten was arrested again the following year, charged with five years of wrongdoing that included stealing from the elderly man and the theft of $640,000 from a law firm where she was a paralegal.

Sweeten pleaded guilty again and was sentenced to more than eight years in federal prison. This time, the judge called her a “master con woman.”

On Tuesday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Christopher John Mannion said Sweeten next began stealing from a Doylestown excavating company soon after she went to work there in the fall of 2017 as its bookkeeper. She wrote company checks to herself, signed over to herself incoming and outgoing company checks, and bought tens of thousands of dollars of items for herself with a company credit card, authorities said.

In the 40-minute hearing Tuesday, Sweeten, who now lives in Delanco, Burlington County, told U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Savage that she had received treatment for oxycontin addiction in 2018. “I’ve been clean ever since,” she said.

Sweeten pleaded guilty to two counts of wire fraud. Savage said she could remain free on $50,000 unsecured bail to await a Feb. 21 sentencing.

After the hearing, Mannion, the prosecutor, said, “We think this sort of case is especially serious because she took from her employer.”

Her lawyer, James J. McHugh Jr. of the federal defenders’ office said Sweeten’s latest crime took place five years ago.

“Since that time,” he said, “Bonnie Sweeten has been a productive and law-abiding citizen.”

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