NEW YORK, NY.- Federal authorities arrested a Missouri woman Friday and accused her of orchestrating a brazen effort to shake down the Presley family by threatening to fraudulently foreclose on Graceland, Elvis’ home in Memphis, Tennessee, a popular tourist attraction.

Authorities said they had arrested Lisa Jeanine Findley, 53, of Kimberling City, Missouri, on charges of mail fraud and aggravated identity theft.

“The defendant 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,” said Nicole M. Argentieri, the principal deputy assistant attorney general at the Justice Department.

If convicted, Findley faces a mandatory minimum of two years in prison for aggravated identity theft and a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison for mail fraud.

The case burst into the public eye in May, when lawyers for actress Riley Keough, the granddaughter of Presley, went to court to stop what they said was a monthslong, fraudulent scheme to sell Graceland by a company known as Naussany Investments & Private Lending LLC.

In court papers filed in Los Angeles in September, Naussany Investments had claimed that Presley’s daughter, Lisa Marie Presley, who died in 2023, had borrowed $3.8 million from the company and put Graceland up as collateral. The company subsequently scheduled a sale of Graceland to take place in May.

A Tennessee judge blocked the sale in May. (At the hearing, no one showed up to represent the company seeking to sell Graceland.) The state’s attorney general said his office would look into the situation, but the case was later turned over to federal law enforcement.

In an affidavit filed in support of an arrest warrant, Christopher Townsend, an FBI agent, wrote that “using a series of aliases, email addresses and fake documents, Findley engaged in a scheme to defraud Elvis Presley’s family for millions of dollars by threatening to foreclose on the ‘Graceland’ estate owned by Mr. Presley’s family and auction Graceland to the highest bidder.”

Townsend said in the affidavit that Findley had used fake names and email addresses, created fraudulent loan documents and unlawfully used Lisa Marie Presley’s name and signature as part of her scheme to defraud the Presley family.

Representatives of Graceland and Keough did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.