Nancy Carroll Pleads Guilty to Stealing More than $1.6 Million from Title Company

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Your worst real estate nightmare: You close on your home, but the sales funds actually don’t pay off your mortgage. Enter Nancy Carroll, the prominent Southlake title agent whose title company was raided by the Texas Department of Insurance about a year and a half ago. Regulators said they were looking for $3 million missing from the company’s escrow accounts, and $2 million from separate investor accounts.

Well, Nancy pleaded guilty Monday in Fort Worth to stealing more than $1.6 million, before she attempted to abandon her business and skipped town last year.

Nancy Jackson Spinks, also known as Nancy Carroll, was arrested in February, 2016, in a north shore suburb of Chicago. She was renting a 6,000-square-foot home in Lake Forest, Ill.

Nancy’s business, Millennium Title, was taken over by the Texas Department of Insurance in February of 2016 when regulators said it had become insolvent and Nancy, the owner, had disappeared. Nearly $3 million had vanished from the company’s escrow account. At the time, sources told me the funds stolen could be as high as $30 million.

Nancy had been living in Lake Forest, Illinois, a north shore Chicago suburb, where she had rented a house until police caught up with her. According to a source, Nancy was up north visiting her sister, Diana Stehling, who lives there with her children and husband. Diana is a CPA, according to my sources. Nancy was caught when she went out to eat at a Chicago area mall and paid for her food with her PayPal account. Mall security was notified that she was “wanted”, and she was arrested while walking to her 16 year old son’s Mercedes. She was then expedited back to Texas (click on this link for the Motion for Substituted Service).

No sentencing date has been set, but we are watching. Nancy’s crime carries punishment of five to 99 years in prison. But she could also be eligible for parole, according to prosecutors.

Here is what Carroll pleaded guilty to: misappropriation of fiduciary property and theft of $1.6 million.

Her attorney, Lance Evans, did not indicate whether she would seek probation, but offered this statement:

“Ms. Carroll admits her responsibility for the conduct alleged in the indictment and is prepared to receive her punishment at the appropriate time,” he said.

I have so many questions. One, what is Bubba, her 22- year-old husband doing now? And two, what happened to her first attorney, Tim Moore?

Candy Evans, founder and publisher of CandysDirt.com, is one of the nation’s leading real estate reporters.