Bank robbers used to burst into banks brandishing guns and bearing notes demanding cash to the teller behind the window. Today, the thieves may be on the other side of the counter. As concerns over identity theft and foreign cyberattacks rise, customers are largely in the dark about a growing threat just around the corner: bank tellers and managers with instant access not only to their critical personal information, but also to their cash.
Though much of the focus on bank fraud has been on sophisticated hackers, it is the more prosaic figure of the teller behind the window who should worry depositors, according to prosecutors, government officials and security experts.
Tellers and those who oversaw them once played a sober, respected role in towns small and large, carefully counting out bills and peering at signatures. But ATMs, direct deposits and electronic banking have diminished tellers’ importance, to the point that their work is now low-paid and, prosecutors say, occasionally criminal.
Rich and elderly bank customers are particularly at risk, prosecutors say, when tellers and other retail-branch employees tap into accounts to wire funds without authorisation, make fake debit cards to withdraw money from ATMs and sell off personal information to other criminals. Accounts with high balances and those with direct deposits of government funds, like Social Security payments, are especially coveted.
“It’s a rampant problem,” said Brenda Fischer, chief of the Cybercrime and Identity Theft Bureau for the Manhattan district attorney’s office. The Manhattan prosecutor’s office estimates it brings at least one case against a teller per month.
Last year, a teller in White Plains was sentenced for her role in an identity theft ring that pilfered $850,000 from bank accounts. Wiretaps revealed that the defendants spoke in code about potential bank targets, referring to TD Bank as ‘touchdown’ and JPMorgan Chase as ‘Yase’. A former teller at a Capital One branch in Maryland was sentenced in 2014 for gaining access to seven accounts and passing customer information to a co-conspirator who drew checks on the accounts.
Across the country last year, cases included a former Pennsylvania teller sentenced for withdrawing money from accounts; a former Manhattan teller sentenced for using information to receive tax refunds that he routed to himself; a former Connecticut teller who took cellphone photos of account information, and used that to cash fraudulent checks; and a former Virginia credit-union teller who took out loans from the union in customers’ names. The money she stole ultimately led to the credit union’s collapse.
Other lower-level employees who work at bank branches may have too much access to customer information, prosecutors say: In December, prosecutors in Brooklyn obtained indictments against two bankers who worked at retail locations of JPMorgan Chase in the borough, saying they withdrew roughly $400,000 from accounts through fake ATM cards and in-person withdrawals.
Bringing charges against tellers and low-level managers can be challenging, prosecutors say, because of banks’ lax security controls and gaps in regulation. One Chicago-area teller jumped from Washington Mutual to LaSalle Bank to Fifth Third before he was caught, withdrawing over $2 million along with his co-conspirators. The crew rerouted customers’ addresses to mailboxes they controlled, created driver’s licences in customers’ names to open credit cards, and even created fake businesses so they could buy credit-card terminals — then approve the fake charges they had rung up.
Despite the sums at stake, executing the crimes can be easy, prosecutors say. Many of the tools that criminals need, like a card printer, are just a mouse click away, available for purchase for a couple of hundred dollars on the Internet. And videos that detail the mechanics of the scams circulate online in a kind of underworld collection of do-it-yourself segments.
Tellers and employees at retail branches, who can gain access to a customer’s information with a few taps of a keyboard, are at the centres of the schemes. Last year, for instance, Peter Persaud, an employee at a Chase branch in Brooklyn, sold customer information to an informer for $2,500 per customer, according to federal prosecutors.
Persaud has pleaded not guilty; the case is continuing. — New York Times News Service
