BY TIM WILLERT twillert@opubco.com
An Edmond woman is accused of posing as a travel agent and charging four Korean college students more than $7,000 for plane tickets they never received.
Laekin Brittany Darter, 26, was charged Thursday in Oklahoma County District Court with five counts of obtaining money under false pretenses.
Darter cashed checks totaling $7,072 but never produced tickets, and issued flight itineraries that turned out to be bogus, according to a probable cause affidavit.
One of the students, Eunju Kim, reported the alleged fraud to Edmond police in April, and a second student, Jae Bae, came forward in May.
Both told police they were Korean college students who paid a woman for plane tickets to go home to Korea for the summer.
They said the woman presented herself as a travel agent and they wrote her personal checks for tickets, according to the affidavit.
Bae wrote the woman two checks totaling $2,561 and Kim wrote her a check for $1,635, police said.
Bae told police he had passed on the woman's name to friends and relatives before learning he had been duped.
Edmond police detective Michael Chesley attempted to meet with Darter several times in April and May, “but she never showed up,” he wrote in the affidavit.
Chesley reported that he showed the itineraries to the manager of a travel agency in Edmond who said the students' paperwork — including ticket and reservation numbers and numbers unique to the agency Darter claimed to work for — was invalid.
Bae, a car salesman, told police he sold a car to Darter in January.
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