Over the last 18 months, a city data entry clerk allegedly gave some two dozen drivers what seemed like a great deal on their parking tickets -- promising that for half the value of a summons she'd make it go away.
But Department of Finance clerk Karen Frazier wasn't only scamming the parking violations system -- she was scamming her customers too, prosecutors charged today as the unhappy-looking alleged tickets-tamperer was hauled into court in cuffs on an arrest warrant.
Frazier would make the feeblest feints at paying customers' tickets herself, writing a series of one rubber check after another for each ticket -- $24, 000 in bad checks in all -- prosecutors said, so that when her customers checked the status of their tickets online, odds were the tickets would appear on the screen as "paid."
But at some point, she allegedly discovered a way to fix tickets so they'd stay fixed -- stealing the computer code for an administrative law judge, and using it to break into the parking violation system and render her customers' tickets "dismissed" entirely. Prosecutors say she'd fixed at least six customers' tickets in this way by the time they caught up with her.
The 42-year-old Brooklyn woman, who ran her alleged ticket-fix sideline out of a bodega near her Bedford-Stuy home, made untold thousands of dollars in the scheme, officials said.
Frazier pleaded not guilty to scheme to defraud, bribe receiving and tampering with records, charges that could put her in prison for up to seven years. She was being held last night in lieu of $10, 000 bail.