A Black female entrepreneur in Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania claims in a civil lawsuit that an “overzealous and racist” bank investigator ruined her thriving car dealership by falsely accusing her of making fraudulent deposits and causing other creditors to sever ties with her business. In Marc h of 2023 Tianna Williams, who got into the auto trade as a teenage high school dropout by flipping cars — buying them cheap at auction, getting them fixed up and selling them at a profit to low-income, working class people like herself, with no or bad credit — was on a roll. She’d just completed her best business year ever, with more than $1 million in sales, a huge jump from 2021, when she sold $181,000 in used cars. Tianna Williams at her car dealership in Easton, Pennsylvania. (Photo: Tianna Williams) The rocketing revenue growth at her company Automo-Deals, Inc. was in large part due to her obtaining a finance license, which enabled Williams to secure funding for her customers through third party finance companies, allowing her and them to purchase better and more expensive cars, according to her lawsuit filed in the Philadelphia County Court of Common Pleas and obtained by Atlanta Black Star. That month, Williams says Shazard Mohammed, the manager of a local MT Bank branch, strolled into her dealership in Easton to solicit her business, saying he was interested in supporting small business owners, especially minorities, and invited her to apply for a line of credit. Williams told Atlanta Black Star that his proposal was appealing, as the interest rate on offer by MT was 4 percent, and she was paying 15 percent on her existing credit line at Truist Bank. Then 28 years old, she had not amassed a lengthy credit history. The savings on financing would propel her business even further, and provide more income for the single mom to support her five children, and help her to care for her mother, a cervical cancer survivor who was now battling kidney disease. ‘Reckless and Unreasonable’: Judge Denies Qualified Immunity to Florida Cops Who Fired 31 Shots at Men Suspected of Stealing Pizza and Pokemon Cards She opened a bank account at MT online, then went to the bank’s Bethlehem branch and met with Mohammed, made $35,000 in initial deposits and applied for a $100,000 line of credit. The funds she deposited included a check endorsed over to her by a customer who had just purchased a car, and a check and a wire transfer from a third-party finance company, Automotive Credit Corporation (ACC). A few days later, on March 23, 2023, the lawsuit says, when Williams went to access funds in her new business account, she discovered the account was frozen, and she was denied all access to it. She contacted Mohammed to find out why, and to inquire about her application for the line of credit. Mohammed told her verbally and via email that her credit application was still in process, the complaint says, that the delay was standard protocol for a new business customer, but didn’t disclose why her account was frozen. As she soon found out, an investigator at the bank, Hannah Gmeinder, had initiated a fraud investigation of Williams and her business, apparently finding her initial deposit of the signed-over endorsed check and the wire transfer from ACC suspicious. (In their answer to the lawsuit, MT Bank said that a series of cash withdrawals totaling $12,284 that Williams made a day after transferring $32,355 into her new account were flagged as “potential warning signs” per standard banking policy and triggered the hold on her account). Gmeinder not only froze her business account but also began contacting the two third-party lenders Williams regularly did business with, telling them that she was being investigated for fraud and, without any evidence, that Williams “had engaged in wrongful and illegitimate business practices,” the lawsuit says. At least one of those lenders, ACC, amplified Gmeinder’s false accusations by sending communications to Automo-Deals’ customers, alerting them to the fraud investigation and encouraging them to report Williams and her business to consumer protections agencies and/or law enforcement, the complaint contends. When Williams got wind of what was happening from a customer, she asked Mohammed to set up a conversation with Gmeinder to find out why she was under investigation. When Williams asked her why she would question the legitimacy of a wire transfer from ACC, a bona fide commercial lender, Gmeinder responded by telling her, “’you people’ have a way of trying to make things look legitimate when they are actually fraudulent,” the lawsuit says. Williams told Atlanta Black Star that she responded to Gmeinder’s disturbing comment by telling her, “I really hope you don’t mean, by ‘you people,’ what it sounds like. Are you talking about salesmen, women, or Black people? I hope it’s not Black people.” She says Gmeinder didn’t answer her directly but told Williams “she would do her research and contact me at her discretion, and to no longer contact her.” Then, Williams claims, the investigator made an even more shocking comment: “Even if you are proven legitimate, I’m going to make sure I put you out of business,” Gmeinder allegedly warned. The bank denies in their answer that Gmeinder made any such prejudicial statements. But an internal email dated March 29, 2023, obtained by Williams’ attorney, Dean Malik, from Gmeinder to MT bank managers discussing her progress on the fraud investigation of Williams concluded with this statement: “Doing my best to not let her win on my watch “The lawsuit says it took more than a month for the bank to determine no fraud had occurred and to restore her access to her account. During that time, Williams had no access to her own capital to pay her bills and her debts mounted. And, because of the damaging allegations made by Gmeinder, the two commercial auto lenders with which she had relationships, ACC and New City Funding Corp., informed Williams they would no longer do business with her. Tianna Williams specialized in helping customers with impaired credit to buy cars at her dealership in Easton, Pennsylvania. (Photo: Tianna Williams) Due to the cancellation of those contractual relationships and “the chain reaction of disparagement of Plaintiff’s business” caused by the investigator’s false accusations, Williams’s business experienced an abrupt and nearly complete loss of revenue, the lawsuit says. This ultimately resulted in “complete devastation of her professional reputation” and the collapse of her auto dealership. Prior to bringing her business to MT Bank, Williams had increased her sales revenues five-fold to more than $1 million in her first full year of operating with a finance license, and “had every reason to expect continued and dramatic growth for her business,” the complaint asserts. Had the bank not disrupted her business relationships and access to credit, Williams says, “I would be a franchise by now. I was getting very popular in the automotive business. The amount of money I would have made, with the [new credit line and] difference in the interest rate, I would have sped into the franchise world.” Instead, the business she built from scratch is now kaput and she is struggling to get by and to support her family. Williams, whose house burned down last June, forcing the family to relocate, said she has spent most of the savings she had socked away, and is “holding on by a thread.” “I have lost my sense of purpose,” she said. “This has created very low self-esteem in me. My life was completely altered. I feel I earned my name in the automotive business, I was a great salesman and helped my mom get the best treatment when she had cancer. And now I have nothing to fall back on. I have five children, and it’s just me. I was prepared to give them a specific lifestyle, generational wealth, and it was all torn away.”  The lawsuit, filed in March 2025, says “a promising future in an industry that Plaintiff worked to enter has been derailed for no reason other than spite, racism and self-righteousness of an overzealous and unrestrained fraud investigator.” It accuses Mohammed and MT Bank of fraudulent inducement and brings additional claims against the bank for tortious interference with contractual relations and for negligent failure to train and supervise. The plaintiffs, Williams and Automo-Deals, Inc., originally sought a jury trial to determine actual and punitive damages. After protracted battles over discovery, with the bank fighting to keep what it considers privileged documents related to its investigation sealed, Judge Paula Patrick in October ordered most of the documents to be unsealed and sanctioned MT Bank and Mohammed with nearly $8,000 in penalties. The bank has appealed her ruling to the Pennsylvania Superior Court, where the matter is pending. Meanwhile, in late December the parties jointly moved to stay the proceedings while they attempt to resolve the case amicably through mediation. “I hope to make my client whole and achieve justice, one way or the other,” Malik said. The goal is for Williams “to go back in business and put her in a position as if it had never happened in the first place, to restore that future they took from her,” he said. “If I can do it by settlement, then that’s perfectly acceptable, but we’re ready, we’re perfectly confident in going to trial too, if that doesn’t work out.” ‘You People’: Black Pennsylvania Woman Sues Bank After It Wrongfully Accused Her of Fraud, and Allegedly Caused Her Booming Car Dealership to Collapse ...read more read less