Ex-Bank of Colorado employee gets prison in fraud case
Written on June 18, 2010
A former employee of Bank of Colorado was sentenced on Friday to 40 months after pleading guilty to bank fraud, U.S. Attorney David Gaouette and FBI Special Agent in Charge James Davis said.
Patricia Cabano, 56, of West Sacramento, Calif., pleaded guilty on April 5 to taking money from unsuspecting customers’ accounts at the Bank of Colorado office in Craig from 1998 to 2002.
In addition to the prison sentence, U.S. District Judge John Kane ordered Cabano to pay $535,530.67 in restitution to victims and to serve five years on supervised release following her prison term. She has been barred from ever working in the financial industry again.
According to the stipulated facts contained in the plea agreement, Cabano, as a head bookkeeper and later operations officer at the bank, used her position, knowledge of operations, and her largely unsupervised access to customers’ accounts to facilitate fraud.
From July 1998 through November 2002, Cabano made numerous unauthorized electronic transfers from unsuspecting customers’ accounts to her own accounts and the accounts of customers she favored, as well as some of her family members, according to the plea agreement.
“People put their trust in banks, and when a bank employee steals from customers, it reduces the confidence people have in their financial institutions,” Gaouette said in a statement.
“This is one of the more complicated internal fraud cases with a single suspect that the FBI has investigated in the Denver Division,” Davis said in a statement.
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