Pa. carjack-hoax mom gets 8 years for $1M fraud

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — The in-vitro treatments. The suburban house. The lavish trips and dinners out.

None of it was worth it, a soccer mom-turned-"abduction hoax" mom told a federal judge today before she was sentenced to more than eight years in prison for a $1 million swindle.

Bonnie Sweeten, 40, of Feasterville, is infamous for an alarming 911 call that claimed she and her 9-year-old daughter had been carjacked by two black men. She said they'd been stuffed into the trunk of another vehicle. She made an equally furtive call to her second husband.

Sweeten, who is white, was instead on her way to the airport with her middle child in May 2009, about to use a co-worker's passport to board a flight to Florida. She feared an arrest looming in the fraud scheme. The FBI found the pair unharmed the next day at Disney World.

"I wanted something so bad that I would do whatever I had to do to get it," Sweeten said. "When you go to prison, you realize you don't need anything monetary. You don't need any of it."