A former congressional staffer pleaded guilty to snatching over $20,000 from an Ohio congresswoman’s bank account to pay off her credit card bills, according to authorities.
Courtney Hruska, 40, entered a guilty plea on Tuesday to wire fraud charges after using the financial information of her ex-boss for her personal expenses, according to the US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia.
Though officials did not publicly identify the victim of the case, records showed that Hruska previously worked for Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), NBC News reported.
Hruska, of Alexandria, worked on Kaptur’s staff between August 2015 and January 2022 and was entrusted with the congresswoman’s personal credit card and bank information as part of her job, prosecutors said.
Over a year after leaving the gig for a job with the US Department of Agriculture, Hruska used the congresswoman’s financial information to make wire payments toward her own credit card balance “without authorization,” according to court documents.
Between Aug. 19, 2023, and July 30, 2024, the longtime staffer used the congresswoman’s funds to pay her own credit card bills 10 separate times, documents showed.
In total, Hruska siphoned $22,865.07 from her former boss during the scheme.
Hruska told officials she knew the congresswoman was “not tech savvy” after seven years as her staffer and that she did not use electronic banking or receive immediate alerts from her bank, according to a statement of facts in the case.
“Because more than a year had lapsed between Hruska’s first fraudulent transaction and the member’s discovery of the theft, the member recovered less than nine percent of the stolen funds in fraud compensation,” prosecutors wrote in a press release.
Representatives for Rep. Kaptur, 79, did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
Hruska will be sentenced on June 23. She faces up to 20 years behind bars, prosecutors said.
