A woman who bought gift cards with counterfeit checks at stores in Missouri and four other Midwestern states has been sentenced to four years in prison. The federal prosecutor in St. Louis says Chrishawn Marchae Johnson also bounced checks to buy flat screen TVs and computers. The charges say she or her friends then returned the merchandise she had bought with the cards and checks and got cash refunds.

The prosecutor says Johnson and a friend passed almost $55,000 worth of bad checks in a few days in St. Louis last June.