The fictitious corporation Naussany Investments, which deceived Elvis Presley's family, left a trail of evidence that eventually led to a grandmother in Missouri.
BRANSON, Missouri — The gnome-lined porch of a trailer set beside one branch of a meandering lake and a tiny, peaceful community close to the Ozark Mountains were the destinations of last week's quest for the enigmatic corporation behind a plot to kidnap Elvis Presley's Graceland home.
There, too, the route was equally meandering, tracing backroads over decades and state borders, via criminal histories, family trees, court cases, and recollections from long ago.
The whole thing started in May with a blatant scheme that made headlines throughout the globe: Naussany Investments, a firm that didn't appear to exist and was headed by individuals who didn't seem to exist, filed a claim that they owed Graceland money. When Lisa Marie Presley passed over a year ago, Naussany Investments claimed she owed them millions of dollars in overdue debts. Unable to get payment from the Presley estate, the business threatened to forcibly take the historic Memphis, Tennessee, house via foreclosure as reparations.
The paperwork submitted in support of Naussany Investments' argument was obviously falsified, and the con artists revealed their scheme just a few days after a court delayed the foreclosure auction.
The con artists announced their departure from the hoax in a letter to NBC News and other media after taking on the personas of executives for the fictitious Naussany Investments firm, namely "Kurt Naussany," "Gregory Naussany," and "Carolyn Williams." correspondence from a self-identifying email Gregory Naussany claimed to be a member of a network of identity thieves from Nigeria and arrogantly said that they would not be afraid to prey on people after the Graceland scandal. The email, written in awkward Spanish, said, "We sit back and laugh at you idiots and watch you make fools of yourselves." "Follow us in Nigeria."
That admission seemed to be the last chapter in a legal drama that was now under investigation by the authorities, including Tennessee's attorney general, whose office said it was looking into Naussany Investments.
However, the tale did not finish there. Several hints found in the falsified loan documents and court filings related to the foreclosure case led, not to a group of con artists in West Africa, but to a city five hours northwest of Graceland, where a complicated legal dispute unfolding on Facebook and in local courts had unexpected ties to the Naussany case.
Due to these connections, a grandmother in Branson, Missouri, was exposed as a con artist with a decades-long history of bank fraud, forged checks, and romantic scams totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars. She was sentenced to both state and federal prison for her crimes.
Although she now goes by Lisa Holden, her past relationships, relatives, and victims still recognize her by various last names, such as Howell, Findley, and Sullins. Lisa seemed to use the moniker Naussany to submit nasty evaluations for persons and companies she didn't like and favorable ratings for those she liked. NBC News discovered Lisa via Facebook and Google. Lisa seemed to be connected to the unsuccessful effort at Graceland by more than six linkages, which included fictitious identities, phone and fax numbers, and post office boxes.
Lisa is known by a variety of names: an inherited fortune, an underwater welder, an online harasser, a fraudster, a lady who faked cancer, and an entrepreneur in the cannabis industry. They seem to agree on one thing: She is tenacious.
"Oh, she doesn't give up," said Paula O'Dell, a flight nurse who worked with Lisa and sued her successfully in 2007 to have the $6,000 Lisa had taken out on fraudulent pretenses returned. O'Dell answered the phone as a reporter was leaving a message on her answering machine.
"Oh my goodness, I thought when I heard that name." O'Dell said. "Now what has she done?"
Kurt Naussany, an official at Naussany Investments & Private Lending LLC, started contacting Lisa Marie Presley's estate via email towards the end of the previous summer, requesting payment for a purported $3.8 million loan that she had taken out in 2018, using Graceland as collateral.
According to the estate's attorneys, the papers submitted as proof of the debt—which contained notaries' and Presley's signatures—were fabricated. This prompted them to launch a lawsuit against Kurt Naussany and Naussany Investments in an attempt to halt Graceland's planned May 23 foreclosure auction.
It was soon evident that Kurt Naussany was a fictitious person. Furthermore, Naussany as a name did not seem to exist. It was not mentioned in corporate or court papers, nor in any of the several public records databases that NBC News consulted. The only other individual connected to the attempted sale of Graceland was Carolyn Williams, who was identified in the falsified loan paperwork as Naussany's "senior collection officer," but her name was too common to locate.
Kurt and Carolyn lived online, albeit they may not have existed in the actual world.
Kurt Naussany, posing as "a Law Enforcement Investigator," posted a critical Google review at a vehicle dealership in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in September, cautioning people to "BEWARE OF THERE FRAUD!!"
Additionally, "Carloyn Naussany," a new Facebook page describing herself as a self-employed entrepreneur in Branson, was made. This seems to be an attempt to misspell "Carolyn." Lisa had made friends with a dissatisfied former employee, and the two would fight it out using the account as a weapon. The nail shop in the area is the opponent.
The account's first post on the town's dirty laundry Facebook page, Branson Buzz, was a critical appraisal of the nail salon: This should be sufficient to explain NV NAILS BRANSON LANDING to you. It's unfortunate that a small child's fingers were lost due to negligence. I wonder if the salon is being sued. In her evaluation of NV Nails, Carloyn Naussany supplied images of a complaint from a mother in Las Vegas who claimed her daughter's manicure on vacation in Branson required surgery to remove her fingers. Screenshots of additional reviews from users with the identities "WelderGirl" and "None Ya" were uploaded to Google.
Even worse Following under various identities were reviews on Google and Facebook for the salon, very few of which seemed to be attributed to actual persons. The evaluations were riddled with typos and had a similar nonstandard usage of punctuation, capitalization, and language. Stories of displeasure, threats of legal action, and personal insults and allegations against the owners were all included.
NV Nails' proprietors were close friends. Less than a year before, they had purchased the company from the long-time owner, who was hoping to retire. Even though Branson is well-known for its Elvis imitation acts and long-term hotels that resemble Vegas but are owned by Christians, they had no idea what to expect.
They started getting messages from someone posing as "Carolyn," a Missouri state investigator with no last name, in addition to the evaluations that seemed to be phony. Carolyn threatened legal action in the messages on behalf of Rasheed Jeremy Carballo, a former salon employee.
The messages would be used as evidence in lawsuits filed by the proprietors of the salon in Taney County, Missouri, last September in an attempt to get protective orders against Carballo. They said he was responsible for an odd campaign of harassment that included sending them a barrage of bogus bad ratings and persistent messages and emails from Carolyn, the "investigator."
Salon owner Karen Virtudazo said she was "continually sent emails, texts, phone calls posing as law enforcement, attorneys, the Missouri attorney general, Secretary of state investigator, and the U.S. Marshall" in her request for an order of protection. She stated that one lawyer—whom she subsequently found out was a fraud—had informed her that she was facing a $1 million lawsuit and had requested her Social Security number in order to defend herself. Virtudazo provided it. She said in a police complaint that she immediately started getting credit alerts indicating that someone was applying for loans in her name.
In an interview conducted recently at her lawyer's office, Virtudazo recalls that it was "scary." Furthermore, it was happening at a really difficult time—her mother had just passed away in the Philippines. At the time, I was under a lot of stress. I had no idea what was happening. I thus get anxious when someone refers to me as a state lawmaker or a U.S. Marshal.
There was also a goal for the other salon owner. A bad evaluation of the bank where she worked was uploaded on Google under the name Kurt Naussany, who claimed to be from the FDIC's "Government Investigation Dept." The review claimed that the employee had engaged in fraud and embezzlement.
Carballo, a new immigrant from Belize, had secured employment at the salon painting nails. After an August 2023 incident in which the police attended to a confrontation between Carballo and a client about the quality of his work, it would be a short job and an ugly breakup with the proprietors.
Carballo's social circle in Branson was small. He had met Lisa, a local Starbucks employee, while he was a barista there, and she became one of his first pals. Carballo said in phone calls with NBC News that Lisa informed him she was entering the cannabis shop industry and that an inheritance had made her wealthy. After the argument with the salon owners, Lisa promised to help and gave him a place at her house. He said that while initially moral, this support later spread to include the harassment campaign and the assurance of legal assistance. Both in court documents and during an NBC News interview, Carballo maintained that he was not involved in any harassment.
With regard to Lisa's incessant emails, messages, and evaluations, Carballo claimed, "She was terrorizing these people."
In September, Lisa, who had previously been a client of the salon, emailed Virtudazo, as shown by an email acquired by NBC News. It was an email sent from Lisa's account that conveyed information about a lawsuit that was about to be filed and an investigation into the nail shop on behalf of the mother of a Las Vegas woman, based on the Google review. The sent letter was signed by Carolyn Williams of the fictitious "Investigations Dept." in Jefferson City, Missouri, and included a PDF of a consumer complaint filed with the state attorney general.
Lisa said in her email, "Not good." "That company is having major problems."
The agent who submitted the claim in January on behalf of Naussany Investments in the effort to compel Graceland's sale was also identified by the name Carolyn Williams.
Carballo said that Lisa first volunteered to cover the cost of hiring an attorney to oppose the salon owners' requests for orders of protection, but in the end, she assisted him in submitting court filings and went with him to a hearing. Carballo submitted a motion to dismiss Virtudazo's protective order lawsuit in January. According to Carballo, Lisa gave him the address P.O. Box 514, Kimberling City, MO, which is included in the petition.
In the same month, Carolyn Williams, acting on behalf of Naussany Investments, submitted a creditor's claim to Los Angeles County against Lisa Marie Presley's estate. Naussany's address was given as P.O. Box 514 in Kimberling City.
There were further links to the Graceland fraud as well:
One: Carballo sent a handwritten letter to the court in February on the protective order matter. 1-877-361-0412 was the fax number that Carballo claimed Lisa submitted the letter on his behalf. The same number was used in May by a person going by the name Gregory E. Nassauny to fax a motion in Shelby County Chancery Court in Tennessee, requesting that the Presley estate not be allowed to halt Graceland's foreclosure auction.
Two: The number that appears on the paperwork from September that were attached to the bogus creditor's claim for Presley's loan in Los Angeles County court is 727-268-7074. This is the same number that Carolyn, posing as a Missouri state investigator, used to text the salon owners. A copy of an email in which Kurt Naussany requests records from U.S. Bank was submitted by the Naussany firm in that submission. The number 7074 is used in his email signature.
And three: Public records databases link Naussany's second reported address—P.O. Box 1015 in Hollister, Missouri—to the name and email address Lisa now uses.
Although Carballo didn't know the name Graceland, he thought Lisa Marie Presley sounded familiar, he told NBC News. Carballo spent almost five months living with his buddy Lisa. She discussed a foreclosure arrangement, Lisa Marie Presley's home, and how she and a California lawyer were going to acquire a couple of million dollars with Carballo early in 2024, he claimed. Carballo said that he gave his knowledge to the FBI in an interview with NBC News. An FBI spokesman said that the organization does not discuss investigations, whether they are likely or not.
In order to be closer to family and have more opportunities, Carballo moved to Illinois in February and left Branson, he claimed. Naussany persisted in trying to foreclose on Graceland in the meanwhile. Additionally, the Carloyn Naussany account on Facebook, whose picture of a vehicle outside a repair shop led NBC News to the California town where Lisa had previously resided, erupted once again, this time providing an even stronger connection to Lisa.
Carloyn Naussany invited residents of Branson West and Kimberling City to visit the King Food Saver grocery store in March so they could take pictures with the Easter Bunny. The post was made on Facebook. Images of adult Easter baskets for sale and an adult costumed as the Easter Bunny were included in the postings. Subsequently, Lisa shared the same pictures along with her phone number on her personal Facebook account with the Branson Buzz group.
When contacted via phone, Lisa's live-in companion Maria Tazbaz said that her hardware shop was where she sold the Easter baskets. "Those are my Easter baskets; I have no idea who Carolyn is," Tazbaz said. "WelderGirl46" gave Tazbaz's shop, Mr. Riobe Discount Tools and More, an excellent Google review.
The only reviews that Welder Girl had previously written were for Oakley Auto World and NV Nail Salon, where a picture of Lisa smiling next to a salesperson holding her brand-new silver Chrysler was provided. Last week, the same vehicle was parked outside Lisa's house in Kimberling City, which is a collection of trailer parks near Table Rock Lake where she lives with Tazbaz and her sister Linda. P.O. Box 514, the purported headquarters of Naussany Investments, is just a four-minute drive away.
"Do you recall the release date of the film 'Catch Me If You Can'?" In a phone conversation with NBC News last week, Lisa's ex-husband Steven Sullins recalled the 2002 Leonardo DiCaprio movie about a professional forger and conman. That's who she is. She acts in such manner.
In 2002, Sullins and Lisa called it quits on their roughly eight-year marriage. Sullins stated he would learn about Lisa's arrest for fraud and bad checks after the divorce. He stated victims would sometimes get in touch with him and share their tales. Sullins said that while Lisa possessed a nursing assistant certification from 1992 (the Oklahoma State Department of Health does have a certification for a Lisa Sullins as a long-term care aide), Lisa was also passing herself off as an underwater welder, an EMT, and a hair stylist.
"One evening, she entered a bar wearing a doctor's coat, carrying two cellphones and three pagers, and she would say, 'Oh, I have to go outside and take a call,'" according to Sullins. "But I turned around and said to myself, 'She aint no damn doctor,'" looking at other individuals.
Steve, a youngster who lived with his father, was Lisa and Sullins' only child. In a phone chat, Lisa's son indicated that his mother wasn't a trustworthy parent, but they still communicate. He said that Lisa swapped in her vehicle and purchased a pickup for him at South Pointe Chrysler Jeep Dodge Ram in Tulsa last summer. Kurt Naussany said in a review he left for the same dealership not long later that the company took in stolen vehicles as trade-ins.
Steve said that Lisa was fulfilling a long-standing promise to "take care of him" with the vehicle, a vow that had been put off for years. He said that Lisa had discussed creating a trust, and that the funds came from a marriage she had six or seven years before to that, to a Kurt Howell of Las Vegas, who had a pipeline business and employed her as a welder. Neither Lisa Nor Kurt Howell's marriages are included in Clark County's public records databases, nor are there any records for him in Nevada.
"I haven't seen the man before. Steve said of Howell, "I've never met him. "I don't know who he is, where he's from, if this trust is genuine, or anything else like that.
Born in California in 1971, Lisa relocated to Cleveland, Oklahoma, with her family when she was around six years old. Her elder sister had described their childhood as "dysfunctional" in a court file; she was the middle child of three children. Her father, a Vietnam veteran, worked as a correctional officer at an Osage County state jail and ran a bounty hunting business for her parents' bail bond company. She lost her mother to a brain aneurysm at the age of 44.
When Lisa was 26 years old in 1997, she was arrested in Sapulpa, Oklahoma, for writing a fraudulent check. This was her first known run-in with the police. Lisa would go in and out of jails, courts, and prisons for the next twenty years on different charges of stealing checks and credit cards, fraud, con games, intimidating witnesses, and impeding investigations. Because she was often involved in other cases or imprisoned in other jurisdictions, her cases took years to wind through the courts. However, she faced federal indictments in 2005. The prosecution said that she obtained over $180,000 in loans from Tulsa banks by using false Social Security numbers. Lisa was sentenced to 20 months in prison and reparations after entering a guilty plea to one count of making a false statement on a loan application.
By 2009, Lisa was under supervised release; nevertheless, her parole officer said that she was unable to stop committing crimes, therefore the court was urged to consider sending Lisa back to jail. Lisa's violations were listed by the parole officer in a letter to the judge: To win over a judge to her side in a case involving fraudulent checks, she pretended to have cancer. While employed as a cashier at a KMart in Sand Springs, she stole a check. When shop security contacted her, she admitted to the crime. Additionally, Lisa stayed in a business king suite at the Ramada Oasis Convention Center when visiting Springfield, Missouri, and departed without paying for her accommodations. Lisa booked 48 hotel rooms while under pretense of working for KMart's parent business to prepare a conference. This was "part of a scheme to defraud the hotel," according to the parole officer.
Lisa was freed in 2011 after serving a large portion of 2010 and 2011 in an Oklahoman jail. According to her probation officer's assessment, she relocated eleven times in the next three years, largely to follow the trail of lovers she met on online dating services and repeatedly conned. Once Lisa persuaded him to lend her money in order to access a gold inheritance, the guy lost thousands of dollars. The parole officer testified that she had "noticed, and attempted to stop, a pattern by the defendant of defrauding her boyfriends" at a hearing to revoke her freedom. A judge re-locked her.
Lisa's two-year-old sister Linda, who also goes by several names, was having legal issues at the same time due to an early-aughts investment scheme that resulted in millions of dollars being stolen.
Compared to Lisa, Linda's offenses were more intricate and included romance scams and bogus checks. The prosecution claims that Linda began seducing victims in 2006 and beyond with the promise of 40% returns on investments made in a fictitious hedge fund named RGM Enterprises LLC. (One victim claimed to have learned later that it meant for "Really Great Money" from officials.) The firm was really operating out of a post office box, but it did have a beautiful office address and a phone number in Las Vegas. Advertisements emphasized the size of the team, which included Joshua Nichols, the chief operations officer, who attended Cornell University. The U.S. magistrate court in the case said that "it is questionable whether Joshua Nichols is an actual person" after the FBI was unable to locate any records of him.
Prosecutors claim that rather of investing the money, Linda squandered it, spending $62,000 on trips, $25,000 on Grammy tickets, and $15,000 on furnishings. She also allegedly sent victims fictitious balance statements that seemed to indicate enormous gains. A check of her possessions revealed marble sculptures, jewels, a mansion, automobiles, and a picture. She turned the straightforward swindle into a kind of Ponzi scheme when investors began suing her for their returns. She utilized a $5 million investment from her biggest fish, a recent Maryland lottery winner, to pay them off. She was charged in December 2010 when the FBI began knocking on her door.
Linda's trial was put off for a long time. According to court documents, Linda neglected to pay two of her lawyers or wrote fraudulent checks to cover their costs, which caused them to resign. Linda also submitted many requests for extensions on the grounds of poor health, citing a variety of conditions as reasons for her petitions, including leukemia, thyroid cancer, lupus, lung cancer, anemia, pneumonia, trouble eating, a mouth infection, excruciating headaches, a swollen throat, vomiting, losing her voice, and a cough. There was no record or indication of leukemia or any other significant condition, according to an independent physician called in at the government's request.
Linda was sentenced to 45 months in prison and three years of supervised release after entering a guilty plea to wire fraud and tax fraud. Bill Livolsi, her spouse at the time and an accountant, received a 24-month term for his involvement in transferring her unjustifiable wealth. He currently guides other white-collar offenders as the deputy director of Progressive Prison Ministries.
Following her release in 2019, Linda secured employment as the manager of a Tulsa apartment complex. According to the current property owner, Linda was let go after things in the furnished flats vanished and the records were not in order, as reported by NBC News.
Lisa, meantime, was pacing. From Oklahoma to Nevada to California and, at last, Missouri in 2023. With the pretense of being a billionaire, she leased a home in Branson while she made her purchase decisions. According to the landlord, Andrew Passey, whom she eventually sued for damages to her house from a basement leak, she provided the property manager with bank documents as proof of her riches. After Passey filed a counterclaim for legal expenses, she decided not to pursue the case further.
Last year, Lisa and Linda moved back in together.
Though there is no proof linking Linda to the Naussany foreclosure caper, there are similarities between the Graceland swindle and the Ponzi scheme run by her fictitious investment business. Carballo, Linda's former roommate, claims that Linda sleeps much of the day and spends most of her nights in her room, "always, always on the laptop." Linda has not responded to many requests for interviews.
It is perplexing to think about how Lisa might have gone from hustling boyfriends and big-box retailers for a living to attempting multimillion-dollar fraud and stealing one of the nation's most cherished sites.
An NBC News reporter arrived on Lisa's house early one June morning. After out onto the porch, Lisa spent thirteen minutes fielding inquiries on her relationship with Naussany.
Lisa said that she was unaware of any Naussany and lacked a P.O. Box. She said that before realizing that she had, she had only uploaded pictures of Easter baskets to her own Facebook account and not Carloyn Naussany's. She claimed to have reported the theft of her IDs to the county last year. (Taney County and Stone County representatives were unable to discover such a document.) She said that she was going to file an identity theft charge with the sheriff that day using the list of Naussany links.
What about the nail shop, Graceland, and all the connections that lead back to her?
Lisa said, "I have no earthly idea what you're talking about."
The reporter texted Lisa after leaving her porch, providing specifics on each Naussany link. Lisa sent a cease and desist letter asking the reporter stop communicating with her after being questioned whether she had reported anything to the sheriff.
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