Woman arrested for alleged attempted theft at Graceland

Earlier this year, a Missouri woman plotted to defraud Elvis Presley's family out of their ownership of his famous Graceland home, but her plan has now been completely foiled. On Friday (August 16), the U.S. Department of Justice announced that the fraudster has been arrested and now faces two decades in prison.

The scam began when 53-year-old Lisa Jeanine Findley allegedly forged loan documents. She posed as three different people and forged the signatures of a notary public and Lisa Marie Presley to claim that Elvis' late daughter had used Graceland as collateral for a $3.8 million loan that she “failed to repay” before her untimely death last year.

From there, Findley filed a false creditor claim in the California Supreme Court and a false deed of trust in the Shelby County recorder's office in Tennessee. He also published a fraudulent foreclosure notice in a Memphis newspaper claiming the property would be auctioned on May 23.

Fortunately, the auction was halted after Lisa Marie's daughter Riley Keough – who is now a trustee of the Promenade Trust, which controls Graceland – obtained a court order to block it. In a statement, Assistant Attorney General Nicole M. Argentieri called Findley's plot a “brazen scheme” and alleged that “the defendant created numerous false documents and attempted to extort compensation from the Presley family.”

Now Findley faces prison time – up to 20 years for mail fraud and a minimum of two years for aggravated identity theft. On Friday, she appeared in court for the first time and reportedly wrote a statement to the court, the Presley family and the media claiming the real perpetrator of the Graceland plot was an identity thief from Nigeria.