Bank Employee Steals IDs, and $1.1 Million

A former Bank of New York employee pleaded guilty late last week to filching the personal identifying information of 2,000 bank employees to help him steal more than $1.1 million from charities, nonprofits and other entities over an eight-year period.

Adeniyi Adeyemi, 27, was a computer technician formerly employed as a contractor in the information technology department of the Bank of New York headquarters in New York. According to court records — detailed in a July 1 news release from Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance, Jr. — Adeyemi used the identity information of the Bank of New York employees to open more than 30 bank and brokerage accounts in those people’s names with several financial institutions, including E*Trade, Fidelity, Citigroup, Wachovia, and Washington Mutual.

Those accounts served as dummy accounts for receiving funds that Adeyemi then stole from the bank accounts of charities and nonprofit organizations. He got banking information of the charities and nonprofits on the Internet — information those organizations often disseminate to facilitate donations, Vance’s news release said.

“This defendant invaded the privacy of thousands of employees by stealing their personal and private information,” Vance said in the release. “He victimized his colleagues, charities, and nonprofits.”

Adeyemi also admitted to stealing an additional $128,000 from the Bank of New York employees themselves — by using their personal information to wire money from their bank accounts to other dummy accounts he had set up. To avoid scrutiny, Adeyemi made sure all of the wire transfers were under $10,000, the threshold at which banks must report transactions to the federal government.

Adeyemi was arrested in the course of an April 2009 search warrant of his apartment, and has remained in custody since.

Adeyemi is scheduled to be sentenced on July 21. In addition to pleading guilty, he signed a forfeiture statement giving up $29,000 in cash seized from his apartment and the $46,000 in an E*Trade account in his name, and acknowledged an outstanding debt of more than $393,000 to E*Trade and Chase Bank.

The two different classes of felonies that Adeyemi pleaded guilty to have a maximum sentence of 15 years and 25 years in prison.