Tacoma woman sentenced to prison for aiding in bank fraud scheme
A Tacoma woman who used her job to steal credit union customers’ account information for a bank fraud scheme was sentenced to 30 months in prison Thursday, U.S. Attorney Neil Floyd announced.
Within weeks of obtaining a work-from-home job at a credit union, 32-year-old Aneicia Ford stole account information from 23 victims, according to the press release. Her job at the union’s contact center gave her access to customer’s personal information, including the amount of funds in their accounts.
Ford passed this information to the fraud scheme’s organizer 23-year-old Dangelo Roberts, who would use it to access and steal customer accounts, the release read. Using false IDs distributed by Roberts, conspirators in the scheme made debit cards to withdraw from the victim’s accounts. The conspirators then ordered cashier’s checks or money orders made payable to their associates with the stolen funds.
The scheme stole about $345,014 from the credit union’s accounts, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.
Ford pled guilty to her charges in May this year. Roberts was sentenced in November to three years in prison.
“Ford knowingly joined in the conspiracy shortly after starting a new job — following training instructing her not to do precisely what she did,” prosecutors wrote to the court when asking for her 30-month prison sentence. “The account takeovers in the case could not have occurred without the personally identifying information she stole.”
