A former Milwaukee woman who said she was awash in bills and gambling losses was charged Tuesday with filing more than $133,000 in fraudulent state Homestead tax credit claims.

Susanna R. Terrell, 39, of El Mirage, Ariz., was charged in Dane County Circuit Court with five counts of making a fraudulent claim for credit by filing fake Homestead claims, a tax credit for Wisconsin renters, with the state Department of Revenue. She was convicted in Milwaukee County in 2000 for doing the same thing.

According to a criminal complaint, Terrell said she started doing it again in 2006 because she had unpaid bills and spent up to $200 per day on lottery tickets. She is scheduled to appear in court on Nov. 20.

According to the complaint:

Terrell cashed most of the DOR checks at the check cashing business in Arizona where she worked. A state DOR agent and a U.S. Postal Service inspector determined that Terrell filed about 139 false Homestead claims using 92 different names from 2006 until her arrest.

The Homestead claims totaled $133,292, and $79,896 in DOR-issued checks were cashed, the complaint states. The DOR and the postal inspector found Terrell after they began investigating a large group of refund checks mailed to Wisconsin addresses but cashed in Arizona.

Terrell told investigators that she got landlord names and addresses for the fake forms from eviction cases she found on CCAP, the Wisconsin Court System's Web site. She said many names and Social Security numbers came from the national customer database at ACE Cash Express, where she worked.

Terrell said she filled out U.S. Postal Service change of address forms so that the credit checks would be diverted to post office boxes in Arizona and to the Oklahoma home of her twin sister, who forwarded the mail to her.