Three months after Graceland was narrowly saved from the auction block, officials say they've arrested the woman behind a plot to allegedly defraud the heirs to the Elvis Presley fortune. Federal prosecutors say that a 53-year-old woman named Lisa Jeanine Findley was behind a scheme to steal the famous mansion from Presley's family, leveraging the unexpected death of the music icon's daughter to undercut the family's ownership of his Tennessee estate.

Via written statement, the Department of Justice Criminal Division head Nicole M. Argentieri says that Findley, who allegedly went by a multitude of names including Lisa Holden, Lisa Howell, Gregory Naussany, Kurt Naussany, Lisa Jeanine Sullins, and Carolyn Williams, “orchestrated a scheme to conduct a fraudulent sale of Graceland, falsely claiming that Elvis Presley’s daughter had pledged the historic landmark as collateral for a loan that she failed to repay before her death.”

Argentieri is referring to a strange tale that unspooled in May, when a company called Naussany Investments & Private Lending (NIPL) claimed that Lisa Marie Presley, who died in early 2023 at the age of 54, had borrowed $3.8 million from the company in 2015, using the deed for Graceland as collateral. Citing the unpaid debt, NIPL announced a foreclosure auction for the home, spurring headlines around the globe.

Soon after the auction was advertised, actor Riley Keough, Elvis’s granddaughter and the trustee to the property, filed a 61-page lawsuit that argued that the documents used by NIPL to justify its claim were forged. The courts agreed and blocked the sale; in a subsequent message to the Daily Mail, a representative of NIPL said it would withdraw “all claims with prejudice.”

The Washington Post reports that a person identifying themselves as Kurt Naussany first contacted Keough's legal team on July 14, 2023, using an email address—naussanyinvestmentsllc@outlook.com—that FBI agent Christopher Townsend says was created earlier that day. In the email, Naussany threatened to foreclose on Graceland if he didn't receive a response within 10 days. When more information on the supposed loan was requested, Naussany responded with a pack of documents that Townsend later determined to be forgeries. According to the DOJ, Naussany demanded a $2.85 million payment to settle the debt. (Vanity Fair has reached out to Keogh's representatives for comment, but have not received a response as of publication time.)

After Keough refused to meet “Naussany's” demands, he filed a Los Angeles collections claim, and moved forward on the foreclosure claim the following year. Once Keough's suit averted the foreclosure, public attention turned to who was behind NIPL, a company with little public presence in the states it claimed to operate. A self-described identity thief based in Nigeria suggested to the New York Times that his "network of 'worms'" was behind the con, while CNN reported that someone using a language primarily spoken by residents of Uganda contacted them to claim responsibility.

But according a June report from NBC, the prime suspect was alleged to be Findley, a Branson, Missouri grandmother “with a decades-long rap sheet of romance scams, forged checks and bank fraud totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars, for which she did time in state and federal prison.”

According to NBC, which says it found Findlay via email accounts used to post "negative reviews for people and businesses she didn’t like," a former roommate of Findlay's went to the FBI after Findlay allegedly described details of the scam, claiming she was “going to get a couple of million dollars.”

When contacted by NBC, Findlay denied any connection to the Graceland case, and sent a cease and desist letter to reporter Brandy Zadrozny. But according to the DOJ, which took Findlay into custody Friday, it was indeed Findley behind the racket, allegedly posing as at least three different people as she allegedly attempted to “extort a settlement from the Presley family."

“Findley allegedly fabricated loan documents on which Findley forged the signatures of Elvis Presley’s daughter and a Florida State notary public,” the DOJ says via statement. “Findley then allegedly filed a false creditor’s claim with the Superior Court of California in Los Angeles, and a fake deed of trust with the Shelby County Register’s Office in Memphis. Findley also allegedly published a fraudulent foreclosure notice in The Commercial Appeal, one of Memphis’s daily newspapers, announcing that Naussany Investments planned to auction Graceland to the highest bidder on May 23.”

Prosecutors have filed charges against Findlay that include mail fraud and aggravated identity theft. If she is convicted of the aggravated identity theft charges, her mandatory minimum sentence will be two years in prison. If convicted of mail fraud, she could be sentenced to as long as 20 years.