Christina Ann Mobley, 59, pleaded guilty to mail and wire fraud for stealing $586,000 from Fortuna-based Beacom Construction over nearly three years, spending the money on casino advances, personal travel, and her own car loan. Senior U.S. District Judge Charles R. Breyer sentenced her to 20 months in federal prison and $586,000 in restitution.

Christina Ann Mobley, a former Fortuna City Council member, was sentenced last week to 20 months in federal prison for stealing $586,000 from her employer, Beacom Construction — money she routed to casino cash advances, personal travel, and her own car loan.

Mobley, 59, had pleaded guilty on December 10, 2025, to two counts of mail fraud and two counts of wire fraud in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Senior U.S. District Judge Charles R. Breyer imposed the sentence, along with $586,000 in full restitution and three years of supervised release, according to the Times-Standard and a Department of Justice release reprinted by goldrushcam.com. (No standalone USAO-NDCA sentencing press release has been located as of this report; the office issued one at the time of the February 2025 indictment.)

The fraud ran from January 2022 through November 2024. Mobley had worked at Beacom — a Fortuna-based general engineering contractor — since the early 1990s, per the federal indictment. When the company's bookkeeper retired around 2019, she absorbed the accounting duties and assumed control of bank accounts, payroll, and check-writing. Prosecutors say she then inflated her vacation time, hours, and bonuses in the payroll system and redirected company checks to her personal credit cards. The indictment identified at least $67,100 in fraudulent mailed checks and $299,700 in ACH transfers to her personal Capital One accounts.

Prosecutors had sought 27 months; Breyer gave 20. Their sentencing memorandum, quoted by the Times-Standard and Redwood Coast public radio station IJPR, framed the harm directly: "People who depended on Beacom for their salaries were afraid they would lose their jobs, with no way to put food on the table." The memo also noted that Beacom "needed her to keep working even after the FBI identified aspects of her fraud and she confessed to what they knew" — Mobley had made herself so operationally central that the company couldn't cut her loose even after exposure.

Mobley resigned from the Fortuna City Council in 2025 after the investigation surfaced, the Times-Standard reported. No public records have established a direct connection between her council role and her activities at the construction company.

She is ordered to self-surrender to the Bureau of Prisons approximately 90 days from sentencing — around late October 2026, per goldrushcam.com. The case was investigated by the FBI and prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin Barry under U.S. Attorney Craig H. Missakian.