Delderico L. Lee, 31, Lawrenceville, Georgia, was sentenced to twenty months in prison to be followed by five years of supervised release. He was also ordered to pay $220,488.25 in restitution. Lee plead guilty to bank fraud on February 3, 2006 in connection with his abuse of a line of credit to steal more than $220,000 from Bank One, N.A., now known as JP Morgan Chase & Co, as well as attempts to obtain mortgage loans based on false bankruptcy documents.

According to United States Attorney David E. Nahmias and the information presented in court:

On March 31, 1998, Lee filed a voluntary petition for bankruptcy under Chapter 7 of the United States Bankruptcy Code. Lee's bankruptcy petition was assigned to Judge Stacy W. Cotton of the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Georgia, who declared Lee bankrupt and entered a court order to that effect on September 2, 1998.

On April 27, 2001, Lee applied for a home equity line of credit from Bank One. In completing the line of credit application, Lee falsely claimed that he not been declared bankrupt within the last seven years. In addition, Lee tendered a forged bankruptcy order, purportedly executed and entered by Judge Cotton, which falsely represented that Lee's voluntary bankruptcy petition and Judge Cotton's subsequent discharge order had been filed in error. Lee obtained the line of credit as a result of the misrepresentation.

In addition to Lee's scheme to defraud Bank One, in April 2004 Lee fraudulently attempted to obtain a $25,000 credit account from First Citizens Bank, N.A., another federally insured institution, as well as, in March 2002, a $66,000 mortgage from 1st Georgia Mortgage Funding. Lee also supplied the forged bankruptcy order to 1st Georgia Mortgage Funding in connection with his mortgage application.

"Court orders must be respected. Far from showing such respect, this defendant, knowing he had been declared bankrupt by a federal judge, manufactured a forged bankruptcy order to obtain a line of credit from a bank," said United States Attorney Nahmias. "The forged order falsely represented that the defendant's bankruptcy petition and the judge's subsequent discharge order had been filed in error, which, when incorporated in a loan application, led the victim bank to provide a line of credit the defendant abused to steal more than $220,000."