Stupid tix-fix Tricks

For more than a year, a city data-entry clerk allegedly gave some two dozen drivers what seemed like a great deal on their overdue parking tickets — promising that for half the value of what they owed, she’d make it all go away.

But Department of Finance clerk Karen Frazier wasn’t only scamming the city — she was scamming her customers, too, prosecutors charged yesterday as the unhappy-looking alleged ticket-tamperer was hauled into court in cuffs.

Frazier would promise her customers she’d “take care of” their problem, but typically left them saddled with nonpayment penalties on top of their original, still-unpaid tickets — in worse shape than before they had met her, prosecutors said.

The 42-year-old Brooklyn woman allegedly operated the scam during her off-work hours, negotiating with customers at a bodega near her Bedford-Stuyvesant apartment.

She’d take their summonses to work, and win a reduced fine by filling out settlement paperwork in the customer’s name — even allegedly forging their signatures.

Then she’d “pay” the reduced fine by mailing in one rubber check after another — $24,000 in all — using her own, typically empty Municipal Credit Union account, a prosecutor said at a Manhattan Supreme Court hearing yesterday.

A check would bounce, a penalty would attach, and Frazier would just allegedly write another rubber check to cover the higher amount.

In this way, she apparently bought herself time. When her customers checked the status of their tickets online, odds were the tickets would appear on the screen as “paid.”

“She bounced over 100 checks” for some 20 customers, Assistant District Attorney Amy Justiniano said after Frazier pleaded not guilty to scheme to defraud, bribe receiving and tampering with records, charges that could put her in prison for up to seven years.

The judge ordered Frazier held in lieu of $10,000 bail.

Frazier was one of two alleged swindling city employees busted yesterday as part of what DA Cy Vance is touting as a get-tough-on-public-corruption initiative.

The other, Philip Portelli, 33, the former top custodian of Edward A. Reynolds West Side HS on 102nd Street, pleaded not guilty to charges he ripped off the city for $105,000 by installing a buddy in a no-show custodian job.