A jury has found a former Wells Fargo employee in Mesa, Arizona guilty of embezzling $655,000 from the bank.
The U.S. Department of Justice says Brooke McDonough, formerly known as Brooke Taylor, has been sentenced to 48 months in prison, followed by three years of supervised release.
Court documents show prosecutors accused the 35 year-old branch manager of stealing cash from ATMs and a vault inside the branch between June 2021 and February 2022.
McDonough was also accused of manipulating monthly audits by entering inflated figures into the bank’s systems to hide the growing cash shortage.
The scheme was discovered after she resigned, and a federal investigation found that McDonough deposited most of the stolen cash into her personal bank accounts.
Prosecutors say she used different ATMs at multiple bank branches and broke deposits into smaller amounts to avoid mandatory currency transaction reports for cash deposits above $10,000.
McDonough was convicted of embezzlement by a bank employee, structuring and transactional money laundering.
The DOJ says the discovery of the theft triggered an internal investigation that caused three other bank employees to be placed on administrative leave.
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