(Forrest City, AR) Forrest City police arrested a woman Wednesday for having financial documents with personal information of more than 30 people across four states.
33-year-old Yolanda Drone was charged with one count of financial identity theft, with more charges expected.
But Drone told News Channel 3 this has been a big mistake.
She said she was initially questioned by police about two other women, only one of whom she recognized as a childhood friend who’s lost touch. She said she has no idea how those two women may be involved.
Drone only said that two strange boxes appeared in her room a couple of months ago. One had an open top with stacked files visible.
“I didn’t bring the boxes here. I don’t know how the boxes got here,” Drone said.
When asked who might have access to her bedroom, she said, “I mean, I have a lot of company come over to my house.”
She said that company often used her computer in her bedroom before police confiscated it during their search. She also said she would sometimes leave to visit her family across the street while company was still at her house.
Drone said she thought about throwing away the boxes, but didn’t want people passing by to be able to pick up the sensitive information.
“I’ll just be praying every day. I’m like, asking God why people want to hurt me. Why people want to do me any kind of way.”
Police Chief Edward Reynolds said in a statement, “I want to commend the Criminal Investigation Division on this arrest and seizure of people’s financial records. They collected evidence yesterday that will take a while to go through and then attempt to identify and locate the victims. This is a crime that destroys one’s credit and sometimes takes years to fix so that they can get credit again. We’ll do our very best to make sure that the victims are located and notified to assist with fixing their credit. This will be a lengthy and time-consuming investigation with the amount of documents that have to be examined.”
Police said records indicate that the files may have come from a document storage company in Memphis, but that has not been confirmed.
Drone said she doesn’t even own a car and can only remember one trip to Memphis when she picked up a friend.
“That’s wrong. Wrong is wrong. I mean, I wouldn’t do that to my kids. So why would I want to do that to somebody else?” she said.
