Woman sentenced for threat, credit-card fraud

A Kalispell woman was sentenced in Flathead District Court on Thursday for using fraudulent credit cards, writing bad checks and threatening a woman in two separate cases that occurred last summer.

Rachel Gingras received a net sentence of 15 years, with 12 years suspended, with the Montana Department of Corrections. The sentence resulted after she used someone else’s credit cards to purchase more than $1,400 worth of items from Albertsons and Town Pump in May 2015.

Gingras was convicted of misdemeanor issuing a bad check and felony deceptive practices.

She also was convicted of criminal endangerment for an incident on July 27, 2015, where she was involved in an altercation with another woman. Gingras confessed to threatening the woman the day she was convicted but did not give specifics of the incident. Court documents claim Gingras hit the woman with the butt of a pistol.

Gingras will have to pay restitution. It won’t include restitution for damages to the vehicles that were broken into to obtain the credit cards.

“There was no evidence she ever broke into the vehicles,” Public Defender Jessica Polan said.

Reporter Megan Strickland can be reached at 758-4459 or mstrickland@dailyinterlake.com.