A woman who met a Montgomery County man on a dating app and then scammed him out of over $400,000 has been sentenced to 15 years in prison.
Janey Sears, 72, was found guilty in July of a $100,000 stealing conspiracy, securities fraud, and fiduciary misappropriation. A jury needed only 75 minutes to convict her.
On Friday, a court sentenced Sears to 20 years in prison, with five years suspended and five years of supervised probation upon his release. The judge ordered Sears to pay approximately $407,000 in reparations in $10,000 monthly installments following her release.
Sears, also known as JaNay St. Clair, claimed to be the CEO of H50 Media, a D.C.-based consulting firm, on her LinkedIn profile. It mentions her participation at the elite prep school Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, throughout the 1990s. At the time, however, Sears would have been in her late thirties.
Following that, he attended Boston University and earned a master’s degree through a Harvard University extension program. The credentials, which have yet to be validated by News4, most certainly pleased the victim, who was 50 at the time.
Following their first meeting in 2019, he encouraged her to live in his home.
“You never know if a person is what they portray themselves to be,” Montgomery County State’s Attorney John McCarthy previously stated. “That certainly proved to be the case here.”
McCarthy described Sears’ relationship with the victim as not romantic. He claimed Sears eventually persuaded the man, a federal government official, to let her invest his money with the promise of high profits.
“She saw that she had a mark,” McCarthy said. “She had somebody she could take advantage of and claiming she was gonna send the money to Goldman Sachs to invest it in Pfizer stocks.”
Instead of investing the money, prosecutors claim Sears wasted it. Financial forensics investigators discovered she spent more than $100,000 at casinos such as MGM and Maryland Live. They also showed jurors how Sears purchased a 2022 Alfa Romeo Giulia for $55,000.
Sears risked a possible sentence of over two decades in prison.
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