Michigan: Woman Sentenced in $4.6M Fraud Was Accused of Sending $100K to FanDuel in One Day

A federal indictment accused Chanise Coyne of sending $100,000 to FanDuel in five debit card transactions of $20,000 each, all dated March 11, 2024. Each one was charged as a separate count of money laundering.

She was never convicted on those counts. Coyne, a 46-year-old from New Boston, Michigan, pleaded guilty in May to a single count of wire fraud, and prosecutors agreed to ask the court to dismiss the rest. On September 22, a federal judge sentenced her to five years in prison.

Her plea agreement does, however, include an admission about gambling: “Significant sums of Victim A’s money were used by Coyne for gambling.”

How the scheme worked

Between roughly April 2023 and April 2025, Coyne took more than $4.6 million from a Michigan family. She told them the money would cover advance fees for their young daughter to appear at modeling events around the country. Court papers refer to the father only as Victim A and do not name the family.

The Justice Department calls those events fictional. According to prosecutors, Coyne posed as a talent agent named “Vivian Sanchez” and as a Nike employee named “Isiah.” She set up a fictitious email account and sent the family fake invoices for companies such as Nike and American Girl, complete with line-item costs and logos she had no right to use.

The family paid by wire transfer, Zelle, PayPal, Square, Venmo and check. Their daughter never took part in a single modeling event arranged through Coyne.

The March 11 transactions

The indictment lists each transaction by an approximate date, not a time, so it does not show what happened first.

According to the indictment, about $160,000 was wired from the girl’s father into Coyne’s account, identified in court papers as X9004, on March 11, 2024. The five $20,000 debit card transactions, each listed as being for “FanDuel,” came from the same account and carry the same date.

Three days earlier, the indictment says, the father had wired about $159,000 into that account.

The indictment does not accuse FanDuel of wrongdoing, and the transactions it lists do not, on their own, show any.

FanDuel is one of the online gaming and sports betting platforms authorized in Michigan, where it partners with MotorCity Casino, according to the state’s Gaming Control Board. The indictment does not say where Coyne was when the transactions went through, or which FanDuel product was involved.

Barred from gambling before trial

Coyne was arrested on February 26, 2026, and released on a $10,000 unsecured bond. Her release conditions already covered her passport, travel, firearms and any contact with the victims. Within two weeks, the court added one more.

On March 5, Pretrial Services asked the court to change her bond. Citing the nature of the alleged offense and the indictment, it said an extra condition was needed “to reasonably mitigate risk of danger to the community.”

The condition itself was short: “Do not engage in, either directly or indirectly, any in person or online gambling.”

Both the prosecutor and Coyne’s lawyer were notified on March 4, and neither objected. Judge David M. Lawson signed off on March 9.

The request was tied to the alleged offense and the indictment. It said nothing about the gambling industry, whose wider exposure to money laundering risks in gaming and gambling is a separate story.

What happened to the FanDuel counts

Coyne pleaded guilty on May 19, 2026, to one count of wire fraud, covering a wire of about $40,000 from the girl’s father dated May 8, 2024. In return, prosecutors agreed to ask the court to dismiss the remaining charges in the indictment, including the five FanDuel counts.

Deals like that are common, and they carry no finding either way about the allegations in those counts. The Justice Department’s announcement of her sentence does not mention FanDuel. On gambling, it says only that she “used significant sums of her fraud proceeds for gambling.” Its announcement from the day she was arrested did name the platform.

Coyne’s own sentencing memo is sealed. Both sides asked for that in a joint stipulation, saying the memo contained sensitive information and that sealing it would protect the privacy of the victims as well as Coyne.

One of her arguments is still on the public record, because prosecutors described it in their own filing. Pushing back on a sentencing enhancement for “sophisticated means,” she said she had deposited the money “directly into her personal bank account” and had not used fictitious entities or multiple bank accounts to hide her transactions.

Prosecutors disagreed. In their sentencing memo, they argued that the enhancement turns on the whole of a defendant’s conduct, and pointed to her impersonation of other people, her fake invoices and messages, and the fictitious email account. They cited a Sixth Circuit decision applying the enhancement to defendants who ran money through their own bank accounts.

Game Empress has not reviewed the judgment and could not confirm how Judge Lawson ruled on the point.

That argument was about her sentence, not the FanDuel counts, and the difference matters. Those counts were brought under 18 U.S.C. § 1957. Broadly, it covers transactions of more than $10,000 through a bank or other financial institution, using money a person knows to be criminal proceeds, where that money comes from certain listed crimes such as wire fraud.

The law does not require shell companies, layered accounts or any attempt to hide the money. Ordinary spending can qualify. So being open about where the money went would not, by itself, have answered those counts. That does not mean she committed them, and she was not convicted of them.

Five years, and what she still owes

Prosecutors asked for 70 months in prison. They told the court that defendants with the same guideline score as Coyne, leaving aside those who received credit for cooperating, had been given an average of 48 months, and argued that a higher sentence was warranted.

Judge Lawson gave her five years, followed by three years of supervised release. Her plea agreement also provides for a $100 special assessment.

She was ordered to pay $4,669,962.76 in restitution, and she separately agreed to a forfeiture money judgment for the same amount. The figures match, but the two do different jobs: restitution compensates the victim, while forfeiture takes away the proceeds of the crime. Nothing in the plea agreement lets one be counted against the other.

The plea agreement sets a minimum payment of $935 a month toward the forfeiture money judgment. Those payments are on hold while she is in prison and start six months after her release.

Restitution works differently. The agreement says it is due as soon as judgment is entered and can be enforced in full right away, and that any payment schedule the court sets is only a minimum and does not limit how the government can collect.

Coyne also acknowledged that she had maintained a New Boston property with proceeds from the scheme. The government agreed not to pursue forfeiture of the property as long as she fully meets the payment and reporting terms.

Until the forfeiture judgment is paid in full, or the two sides agree otherwise, a lis pendens, which is a recorded notice of the government’s claim, stays on the property.

In the plea agreement, Coyne acknowledged that the girl’s parents suffered a substantial loss of savings, including retirement savings, and that the father put off his retirement plans while the mother took on additional work.

According to the prosecutors’ filing, the mother told the court she had worked three jobs to help fund her daughter’s ambitions. The father described the financial and emotional damage as “unconscionable,” and said the family had borrowed from relatives and sold assets to come up with money for Coyne.

Prosecutors did give her some credit. Before this case, they wrote, she appeared to have had no contact with the criminal justice system, had worked steadily throughout her adult life, and had been a dedicated and supportive family member. But they argued that although she was technically a first-time offender, she had “committed fraud on countless discrete occasions.”

The Justice Department’s sentencing announcement adds that, according to court records, she spent more than $200,000 on Taylor Swift concert tickets in Florida while carrying out the fraud.

The plea deal also spells out what happens if it falls apart. If Coyne is allowed to withdraw her guilty plea or breaks the agreement, or if her conviction or sentence is later vacated, prosecutors can bring back the charges they agreed to dismiss, including the five FanDuel counts.