A former employee at a US lender will spend more than two years behind bars for taking hundreds of thousands of dollars from people’s accounts.
The Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Washington says Tacoma resident Aneicia Ford worked with co-conspirators to steal $345,014 from accounts at a credit union.
According to court documents, Ford was employed at the credit union between May and August 2022, where she worked as a home-based call center employee to assist customers with account concerns.
Prosecutors say that within days of her employment, Ford analyzed customer accounts and targeted certain profiles viable for the scheme.
She also collected sensitive financial information from customer accounts, such as the victim’s available funds, age or profession, which she handed over to 23-year-old Dangelo Roberts and his group.
The crew subsequently used the stolen information to forge fake IDs and get debit cards under victims’ names before making as much as $25,000 in withdrawals.
In other instances, the group drained money from victim accounts by ordering cashier’s checks and purchasing postal money orders that were made payable to crew members or associates. They also exploited their unauthorized access to move money between accounts and check on balances.
The credit union had to absorb the losses to make the impacted customers whole.
Say prosecutors,
“Ford knowingly joined in the conspiracy shortly after starting a new job— following training instructing her not to do precisely what she did—and she contributed to the conspiracy for months. The credit union’s electronic logs demonstrate that Ford accessed the victims’ accounts on multiple occasions throughout the course of her employment (and not, for instance, all 23 accounts at once). The account takeovers in this case could not have occurred without the personally identifying information she stole.”
U.S. District Judge Jamal N. Whitehead sentenced Ford to 30 months in prison, saying that her actions had a negative impact on the lives of real people.
“What you did was serious… Your employer trusted you with access to customers’ more personal information…. Real people suffered real harm from the actions that you took.”
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