A woman who met a Montgomery County man on a dating app and then scammed him out of more than $400,000 has been ordered to serve 15 years in prison.
Janey Sears, 72, was found guilty in July of theft scheme over $100,000, securities fraud and misappropriation of funds by a fiduciary. It took a jury just 75 minutes to convict her.
On Friday, a judge handed down a 20-year sentence to Sears, with five years suspended, followed by five years of supervised probation after release. The judge ordered Sears to pay nearly $407,000 in restitution in monthly payments of $10,000 after her release.
On a LinkedIn account, Sears — who also goes by JaNay St. Clair — said she was the CEO of a D.C. consulting firm called H50 Media. It notes her attendance at prestigious prep school Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, in the 1990s. At that time, though, Sears would have been in her late thirties.
That’s followed by attendance at Boston University and a master’s degree from a Harvard University extension program. The credentials, as yet unverified by News4, likely impressed the victim, who was 50 at the time.
He invited her to live with him in his home after their first meeting in 2019.
“You never know if a person is what they portray themselves to be,” Montgomery County State’s attorney John McCarthy previously said. “That certainly proved to be the case here.”
McCarthy described Sears’ relationship with the victim as not a romantic one. He said Sears eventually convinced the man, a federal government employee, to let her invest his money with promise of big returns.
“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 said Sears spent it. Financial forensic investigators found she dropped more than $100,000 at casinos, including MGM and Maryland Live. They also showed jurors how Sears bought herself a 2022 Alfa Romeo Giulia for $55,000.
Sears had faced a maximum penalty of more than two decades in prison.
