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Diving certificate:
- Two former TD Bank employees have been sentenced to prison for their involvement in money laundering and fraud schemes, the Justice Department said last week.
- Former assistant branch manager Wilfredo Aquino, 47, of New York City used his position to enable a money laundering network to transfer hundreds of millions of dollars through TD Bank accounts between 2019 and February 2021, reports say a Justice Department press release dated July 15. He was sentenced to 46 months in prison.
- Between January and May 2021, another former TD Bank employee, Edward Low, 31, of Flushing, New York, Accepted bribes and passed confidential customer information to co-conspirators outside the bank, who then used it to access customer accounts and steal money, the DOJ said. Low was sentenced to 24 months in prison.
Insight into the dive:
Aquino worked with the head of a money laundering network Da Ying Sze, also known as Davidbetween 2019 and 2021. Sze and his co-conspirators transferred approximately $474 million through TD accounts by depositing cash at the bank’s branches, primarily in New York and New Jersey.
In February 2022, Sze pleaded guilty to coordination A conspiracy to launder $653 million in money, operating an unlicensed money transfer business and bribing bank employees, the DOJ said. The plan reportedly involved the sale of illegal fentanyl.
The 2021 case against Sze spurred the DOJ investigation address TD’s anti-money laundering deficiencies. TD failed to monitor $18.3 trillion in customer activity, allowing three money laundering networks to transfer hundreds of millions of dollars through the lender’s accounts, the DOJ said October 2024. The Toronto-based bank agreed to pay more than $3 billion in penalties and capped the assets of its U.S. retail bank at $434 billion.
Anti-money laundering cleanup “remains a top priority for the bank, and TD has been actively cooperating with law enforcement to assist in their investigation,” a TD Bank spokesman said via email Tuesday. “TD has made great progress in rebuilding its AML program, including through significant investments in talent, training, process improvements and technology.”
Although some other TD branches were used for money laundering activities, Sze’s network laundered most of the money through Aquino’s TD store in midtown Manhattan, the Justice Department said. No one processed more transactions for the network than Aquino, the DOJ said in January. Aquino and Sze “exchanged regular text messages about it [Sze]’s account activity,” according to Court documents.
As part of the money laundering scheme, Aquino processed approximately 1,680 official bank checks at TD for Sze and his co-conspirators, totaling approximately $92 million.
Almost all of the checks were funded with a corresponding cash deposit of more than $10,000, requiring the bank to file a currency transaction report. Aquino never referred to Sze as a “conductor” in the reports, even though he knew Sze was making deposits, the DOJ said.
Aquino also knew that TD had closed other accounts linked to Sze because of suspicious activity, and a colleague warned Aquino that Sze’s activities “looked like money laundering,” prosecutors said.
In February 2021, Aquino facilitated three money laundering transactions by Sze, totaling nearly $2 million in cash, into a third-party account and failed to report Sze as the conductor, the DOJ said.
In return, Sze gifted Aquino retail gift cards totaling about $11,000.
Aquino pleaded guilty in January to conspiracy to launder money.
Separately, Low, also known as “Mang Wah Low” and “Eddie Low,” conducted illegal transactions And Facilitated approximately $484,572 in TD fraud.
He received around $26,700 in bribes.
And from May to August 2022, while working at another bank, Low accepted bribes to open an account in the name of a shell company, and his co-conspirators used the account to facilitate $47,195 in fraud, the Justice Department said.
Low pleaded guilty in February for conspiring to commit wire fraud at a financial institution and making false bank entries or reports as a bank teller.
Another one in May former TD Bank employee Cheungkin Lamalso known as Kelvin Lam, pleaded guilty to defrauding the lender’s customers and bribing an employee of another bank to falsify bank records. He worked at one Fresh Meadows, New York branch.
https://www.bankingdive.com/news/ex-td-bank-employees-sentenced-prison-money-laundering-fraud/825662/
