BATON ROUGE — A Georgia woman convicted of wire fraud and unlawful transactions was sentenced to more than five years in prison and to pay nearly $1.7 million in restitution for fraud she committed in Baton Rouge. 

Thanh Hoa Thi Bui, 42, will also serve three years of supervised release after pleading guilty to embezzling fund from a business she worked at from 2017 to 2020. While she lived in Denham Springs at the time of the crimes, Bui was eventually arrested in Las Vegas in October 2023.

According to federal court records, Bui used the company bank account to make hundreds of fraudulent transactions and conceal the scheme from her employer.

More than 100 times, Bui wrote checks that were payable to herself and then used fraudulent pretenses to induce her employer to sign the checks, which she would then deposit into one of her personal bank accounts.

Bui also used the bank account to pay the electricity and gas for a large chicken farm that she maintained in Mississippi and to make payments to a company in Covington that she owed money for real estate that she had bought.