Seattle – Two Bremerton, Washington, women were sentenced this month for a long-running bank fraud scheme where they stole personal information of more than 250 people, announced First Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles Neil Floyd. Emily Vranic, 34, was sentenced to three years in prison; her co-defendant, Heather Marquis, 37, was sentenced to 31 months. Both women were sentenced to three years of supervised release following their release from custody. The two were arrested on a federal complaint in April 2025. At the sentencing hearing for Vranic, U.S. District Judge Tiffany M. Cartwright noted that the pair engaged in what she described as a “multi-dimensional, deliberate effort to defraud many people in many different ways.”
“These defendants attempted to steal at least $330,000 from their victims over a three-year period – ID theft and bank fraud was their ‘job’ and for at least 15 victims they were all too successful,” said First Assistant U.S. Attorney Neil Floyd. “Beyond the financial harm, these defendants stole important records: tax returns; social security cards; retirement account information; divorce filings; immunization paperwork; immigration records; and military records. And each document theft was an invasion of privacy causing harm to the victim.” “These two defendants made it their life’s work to lie, cheat, and defraud their very own community. Using every tool at their disposal to illicitly open accounts, redirect funds, and even paying their own mortgage while victims footed the bill.” said Inspector in Charge Anthony Galetti, “Financial crimes of this nature inflict severe, long-term damage, forcing victims down a protracted road to recovery. Beyond the immediate financial loss, victims face the exhausting burden of closing fraudulent accounts and correcting damaged credit scores. While financial institutions may eventually reimburse stolen funds, they cannot restore the extensive time and energy required to repair the broader collateral damage.”
According to records filed in the case, from approximately 2021 until their arrests in November 2024, Vranic and Marquis defrauded victims and financial institutions in several different ways. Most often, they stole victims’ mail and used personal documents inside to activate credit cards, open new lines of credit, or gain wholesale access to online bank accounts. The pair would have documents related to their activities mailed to a third-party victim’s address, where they would intercept the mail again. Once they had fully taken over a stolen identity, statements and other records were mailed directly to their own Bremerton address.
Armed with their victims’ identities, the pair ran up credit card debt, made transfers from victim accounts to their own, and even used victim accounts to make monthly mortgage payments on the home they shared. One vulnerable victim was targeted with over $110,000 in fraudulent transfers; but for the bank’s intervention, that number would have been in excess of $170,000. Even when banks interceded to protect their customers by freezing targeted accounts, Vranic and Marquis repeatedly posed as account holders to try to get the fraud alerts removed.
In asking for a three-year sentence, Assistant United States Attorney Victoria Cantore noted that though both women suffered from drug addiction, that did not affect the complexity of their frauds. “This scheme nonetheless required an extraordinary amount of organization, planning, and executive functioning skills. Marquis and Vranic kept records of every individual, every account, every piece of personal information that would ensure their scheme’s success. The variety of methods the women employed to steal from their victims was nothing short of labyrinthine to unravel.”
Marquis has agreed to a restitution obligation of $102,784 to the victims. Vranic will have a restitution hearing in October 2026 to determine the amount she owes.
The case was investigated by the Bremerton Police Department, the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office, and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS).
The case is being prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorney Victoria Cantore.