Dive Brief:
- Former TD Bank employee Cheungkin Lam, also known as Kelvin Lam, pleaded guilty Thursday to defrauding the lender’s customers and bribing an employee at another bank to falsify bank records, the Justice Department said Thursday.
- Lam, a financial service representative at a TD branch in Fresh Meadows, New York, facilitated about $3.4 million in fraud, according to documents filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey.
- “Lam abused his position as a bank employee to help fraudsters steal money from unwitting customers and bribed another bank employee to do the same,” Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva, of the Justice Department’s criminal division, said in a Thursday release.
Dive Insight:
Between January and May 2021, Lam, 28, accepted bribes and used his position at TD to identify large-balance bank accounts and steal customer information, the DOJ said.
He made unauthorized inquiries into customers’ bank accounts and emailed his TD supervisors and managers seeking monthly “large balance reports,” according to court documents.
Lam shared the information he gathered on numerous TD customers with his co-conspirators, who used it to withdraw funds from those customer accounts. About $417,300 was taken from one customer’s bank account; TD incurred the loss by reimbursing the customer, prosecutors said.
Lam and his co-conspirators attempted to steal about $6.5 million in all from TD customers’ accounts, according to court documents.
Additionally, from May to August 2022, Lam bribed a co-conspirator who worked at another bank to falsify records in opening a bank account to be used in various fraud schemes by Lam’s co-conspirators.
Lam received at least $155,000 in bribes, prosecutors said.
Lam pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit wire fraud affecting a financial institution and making false bank entries or reports, the DOJ said. His sentencing is scheduled for Oct. 15, and he faces up to 30 years in prison.
“Bank employees are the first line of defense against money laundering, fraud, and other financial crimes,” Duva said in the release. “When bank employees violate the public trust by using their positions to enrich themselves through financial crime, the Criminal Division will investigate and prosecute them.”
A spokesperson for TD didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
