A former employee at a US lender will spend more than two years behind bars for siphoning off hundreds of thousands of dollars from people’s accounts.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Washington says Tacoma resident Aneicia Ford worked with co-conspirators to steal $345,014 from credit union accounts.
According to court documents, Ford was employed at the credit union between May and August 2022, where she worked as an in-home call center agent to assist customers with account issues.
Prosecutors say that within days of her hiring, Ford analyzed customer accounts and targeted certain profiles as suitable for the scheme.
She also collected sensitive financial information from customer accounts, such as the victim’s available funds, age or occupation, which she handed over to 23-year-old Dangelo Roberts and his group.
The crew then used the stolen information to forge fake IDs and obtain debit cards in the victims’ names before making as much as $25,000 in withdrawals.
In other cases, the group removed money from victims’ accounts by ordering checks and purchasing money orders made payable to crew members or employees. They also abused their unauthorized access to move money between accounts and check balances.
The credit union had to absorb the losses to nurse affected customers back to health.
Say prosecutors,
“Ford knowingly joined the conspiracy shortly after starting a new job – after undergoing training in which she was instructed not to do exactly what she did – and she contributed to the conspiracy for months. The credit union’s electronic logs show that Ford accessed the victims’ accounts several times during her employment (and not, for example, all 23 accounts at once). The account takeovers in this case could not have occurred without the personally identifiable information she stole.”
U.S. District Judge Jamal N. Whitehead sentenced Ford to 30 months in prison, saying her actions negatively impacted the lives of real people.
“What you did was serious… Your employer trusted you with access to customers’ more private information… Real people suffered real harm from the actions you took.”
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