Nassau County District Attorney Anne Donnelly announced this week that a Uniondale woman has been sentenced to four to eight years in prison for running a brazen scheme to fraudulently obtain bank loans, including a $75,000 loan she successfully secured from Dime Bank.
Janelle DeFreitas, a second felony offender, was sentenced Tuesday, March 31, following her November 2025 conviction on grand larceny and criminal possession of a forged instrument. Donnelly had pushed for a stiffer sentence of five to ten years, but the court settled on four to eight. For a repeat offender who ran a multi-pronged fraud operation across multiple bank branches, it’s a sentence that should give prosecutors pause.
The scheme DeFreitas orchestrated was neither subtle nor particularly sophisticated, but it was persistent. Between June 2021 and January 2022, she executed a series of attempts to fraudulently secure express business loans from Dime Bank branches, using straw persons to apply for the funds while she pulled the strings behind the scenes.
Her first attempt came on June 29, 2021, when DeFreitas and an associate walked into a Dime Bank branch in Queens and applied for several business express loans totaling over $400,000. The businesses were supposedly operating out of a single Brooklyn address. Dime Bank, to its credit, conducts site visits on loan applications, and when a branch manager showed up at that lone address, it was obvious no legitimate business was running there. The bank declined the loans and shut down the accounts.
Most people would have taken the hint. DeFreitas didn’t.
On August 19, 2021, she showed up at a Dime Bank branch in Garden City with a different individual and a different pitch, this time for a $100,000 loan. She didn’t even provide her real name, which is why the Garden City branch had no idea she’d already been flagged at the Queens location. That loan was denied the same day because of credit issues.
Over the span of roughly seven weeks, DeFreitas was connected to five account openings and six unsuccessful loan applications. The sheer volume of attempts tells you something about her willingness to keep pushing until something worked.
And eventually, something did. She returned to the Garden City branch in late August 2021, still using a fake name, with yet another individual. They opened an account for a company called Katrina the Movie 1 Inc. This time, the scheme advanced far enough that DeFreitas ultimately obtained a $75,000 loan, the transaction that formed the core of the grand larceny conviction.
The investigation ultimately unraveled the web of fraudulent corporate documents, fake certificates of incorporation, and straw person arrangements she had deployed across multiple attempts.
From a law enforcement standpoint, this case reflects well on Donnelly’s office. The DA pursued a complex fraud case involving layered corporate documents and multiple co-conspirators across county and city lines. These aren’t easy prosecutions. Financial crimes require painstaking document analysis, and convicting on grand larceny while also securing the forged instrument count shows the case was built carefully.
From a taxpayer and banking perspective, this case is a reminder of how vulnerable small business lending can be to determined fraudsters. Dime Bank’s site visit policy caught several attempts that would have cost the institution hundreds of thousands of dollars. That kind of due diligence matters, and it should be a model.
For Nassau County residents, the larger takeaway is straightforward. The county DA’s office is prosecuting fraud cases that have real costs to real institutions. When banks absorb losses like this, those costs eventually get passed along. Holding repeat offenders accountable, even when the sentences fall short of what prosecutors requested, sends a message worth sending.
DeFreitas walked into multiple bank branches, used fake names, invented fake businesses, and kept trying after repeated failures. A four-to-eight year sentence for a second felony offender may not satisfy everyone in Donnelly’s office, but it puts DeFreitas out of circulation for a while. In fraud cases, that’s often the most practical form of justice available.