A U.S. Army veteran will serve a year behind bars for wire fraud and stolen valor charges.
Sharon Toney-Finch, 43, of Newburgh, New York, previously made false public claims about assisting homeless veterans. On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Vincent L. Briccetti sentenced her to 12 months and one day in prison for claims of being a Purple Heart recipient as well as for a years-long scheme to defraud military veterans’ charities.
She was indicted by the federal government in April 2024 on four charges: wire fraud, stolen valor, theft of government funds, and forging a military discharge certificate.
In March 2025 she pleaded guilty to the charges, which Briccetti at sentencing in the Southern District of New York (SDNY) called “appalling” and “disrespectful to [her] fellow veterans.”
“Sharon Toney-Finch falsely claimed to be a Purple Heart recipient and used her foundation to defraud donors and others induced by that lie,” said U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton of SDNY in a statement. “Let today’s sentence reaffirm that fraud built on lies about service and sacrifice will carry a heavy price.”
In addition to the prison term, Toney-Finch was sentenced to three years of supervised release and ordered to pay $84,000 in restitution and $85,000 in forfeiture.
Perpetuating ‘Fraud’
The honorably discharged Army vet founded the nonprofit charity Yerik Israel Toney Foundation in New York’s Sullivan County.
The foundation, according to SDNY, intended to raise awareness of premature births, offer assistance to premature babies and their families, and provide a place to stay or transportation while babies were in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU).
It also claimed to help homeless and low-income military service veterans in need of living assistance.
“In fact, the YIT Foundation was largely a fraud” that led her to obtain approximately $85,000 as part of a broader scheme, SDNY said in a press release following Toney-Hinch’s sentencing.
They said she “helped virtually no military veterans” and instead used raised funds donated by charities to the YIT Foundation to spend on her own luxuries—including paying for her BMW, a gym membership, travel, meals, and other personal expenses.
She garnered national attention in 2023 after claiming that veterans her foundation had assisted were being evicted from a motel in Newburgh to make room for migrants who were being bussed to the mid-Hudson Valley from New York City, according to the Times-Herald Record. One donor reportedly wired her foundation $25,000 due to the claim later found to be fake.
Also while fundraising, authorities became aware that she “lied extensively” about her military service. That included false claims that she had been injured in an improvised explosive device attack in Iraq, as well as doctoring her military discharge paperwork to reflect that she had received a Purple Heart.
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