Here are a few of the weirdest things that can happen while doing banking!
10 - Sara Daizli Sara Daizli made Australian
and international headlines not just for her bank fraud, but for her fashionable arrest. She made
an effort to get arrested in style, wearing a slim gray onesie and gold designer slides.
Authorities charged her with 112 fraud-related offenses, which is a pretty impressive amount of
scamming. She used fake documents to submit loan applications and launder half a million dollars.
Sara worked at the same bank she scammed and used her managerial position to steal cash and
transfer it to fake accounts she controlled. If you're going to commit fraud, then there's no
better job than working at the bank you're trying to scam. She cried in court when she learned that
the judge denied her bail, meaning that she'd have to spend Christmas behind bars. However, Sara's
criminal life goes deeper than stealing cash from bank accounts. Her husband, David Sukkar,
is a convicted drug dealer tied to Australian organized crime. And those 112 charges we
mentioned are on top of 15 other charges brought against her a year before. (CTA to like video)
9 - Robert Pipes Robert Pipes, a man from West Monroe, Louisiana,
ended up with this mugshot after attempting to cash a fraudulent check. Maybe he could
have gotten away with it, but people are bound to remember your face when you look like this.
According to the arrest papers, the bank called the police after Robert left. The manager told
them that Robert walked in and tried to cash a fake check. The check was for $1,941.16.
Maybe Pipes thought writing the check for an oddly specific amount
of money would make it seem more realistic. Or maybe he just needed that exact amount
of money for something. Either way, it didn't end up working out for him.
Pipes told the police that it wasn't his fault. He claimed two guys had
offered to pay him 200 dollars to cash some checks. He said he knew the checks were bad,
but he was drunk at the time, so he agreed to do it anyway. Pipes said that the guys
dropped him off at the bank and then left. Nobody ever tracked down these masterminds,
so it's unknown if they were real or just a creation of Pipe's drunken imagination.
8 - Cassandra Morales Cassandra Morales was arrested
after police uncovered her unique bank scheme. She used random homeless people she found on
the street to help her commit financial fraud. Morales had them go into banks, open an account,
and deposit fake checks into those accounts. Then, she'd come in and withdraw the money,
transferring it to her account. She withdrew over 20 thousand dollars in
just a few months with this scam, which she ran 26 different times.
To avoid detection, Morales had the homeless person open an account
using the minimum cash required. Then once the account was open,
they would only deposit fraudulent checks worth less than 200 dollars. Amounts that
low don't automatically trigger red flags in the bank's system.
Eventually, the banks caught on, and police identified Morales and a man she was often with
as the primary suspects. They couldn't hide behind their homeless pawns forever.
At some point, they had to get the money for themselves, exposing their real identities.
7 - Etti Alon
In 2002, Etti Alon confessed to stealing 250 million Shekels from Trade Bank in Israel. She
stole the money from customers over five years but hardly spent any of it on herself. Alon
stole the money for her brother, Ofer Maximov, to pay off his gambling debts to different organized
crime groups in Israel. She tried to save his life and wound up in jail because of it.
Both were sentenced for fraud and spent 15 years in jail for their parts in the scheme.
Alon's theft was so big that it collapsed the entire bank and cost Israel half a billion
shekels in deposit insurance. Alon's scam was so profound that it shook the very fabric
of Israeli organized crime, redrawing the map of the criminal underground as we know it.
Low-level crooks rose to power overnight with the millions flowing through their illegal casinos.
According to Israeli police, the money circulated through
the underground economy. It ended up in the pockets of loan sharks,
gamblers, crime bosses, and other people who had some slice of Maximov's debts.
The money stolen sparked gang wars that lasted for years afterward. Those wars spilled over into
the United States as police busted several arms of the Israeli mafia in Los Angeles.
6 - Junior and Senior These next entries align with the more
"traditional" bank scam. You can do all kinds of fun things with your dad,
like going to baseball games or arguing about politics. Anthony Innarella Sr. decided bank fraud
made for a great bonding activity to try with his son, Anthony Innarella Jr.
They were arrested together after they tried to withdraw thousands of dollars from a fake bank
account they set up. The manager at the Wells Fargo that they tried to scam called the cops
on them after they tried to take out 18 thousand dollars in cash. Taking out 18 grand in cash isn't
normal customer behavior, making the bank rightfully suspicious.
Who needs 18 grand in cash other than criminals and people being blackmailed by criminals?
The manager told them he had to verify a few things, and he couldn't give
them the money right then and there. Anthony Sr., left his phone number with the manager,
telling him to call when the money was ready. Instead, the manager called the cops.
Police caught up to the father/son team and found what they called a 'large sum of cash'
along with several fake IDs. Apparently, they'd committed similar crimes in a nearby county.
They were charged with larceny, criminal impersonation, identity theft,
and forgery. They should have just thrown the old pigskin around if they wanted to
have some bonding time. The courts set their bail at 250 thousand dollars.
5 - Jahmari Britton Jahmari Britton's getaway driver
called the cops on him after robbing several banks in Florida. However, his getaway driver never got
in any high-speed chases. He was an Uber driver who'd spent the day driving Britton all over town.
Britton Ubered from bank to bank, trying to withdraw money from accounts that weren't
his using stolen IDs. When he got arrested, he told police that his name was Andre and
handed them a driver's license listing his name as Andre Rodriguez. He claimed
he was withdrawing all this cash for a music video, which was a pretty clever excuse. It's
pretty common to see rappers throwing around lots of cash in music videos.
When police found him, Britton had seven different IDs on him. Four were his,
and three were completely different people. They charged him with possessing a counterfeit
driver's license, giving false ID to law enforcement, fraud, and illegal use
of a credit card. These aren't the most common crimes, so at least he gets points for being a
little creative. Maybe next time, he'll hire an actual getaway driver instead of calling an Uber.
4 - Robert and Tiffany Williams Robert and Tiffany Williams, a couple
from Pennsylvania, faced felony theft charges when their bank accidentally deposited 120
thousand dollars into their account. That was the bank's fault. But the couple spent most of it
and actively avoided the bank's calls, quickly turning a random mistake into a legal problem.
According to police, they bought an SUV, a camper, two four-wheelers,
and a car trailer. It sounds like they used the money to plan a sick camping trip. They
even gave $15,000 to a friend in need. But how did they get the money in the first place?
Somebody did deposit $120,000. However, the bank teller typed in an account number wrong.
The person who was actually supposed to get the money asked the bank what was going on,
and the bank realized that the Williams family ended up with it.
In an interview, Robert blamed poor legal advice that he'd gotten from some people.
They probably thought the money was theirs to spend if someone accidentally deposited
it. With all the checks and balances banks put in place, many questioned how such an egregious
mistake could have happened. Then again, we're not too surprised with all the scammers and
swindlers we cover on this channel. Check out this video for the full story on Robert
and Tiffany Williams, here! 3 - Nick Leeson
Nick Leeson is an English criminal and former derivatives trader. He committed such
massive fraud that he single-handedly brought down Barings Bank, the oldest merchant bank in England.
Leeson made unauthorized trades with money that wasn't his. And he had a bold strategy for trying
to make sure he always came out on top. Every time he lost money, he doubled the amount on
his next trade to recoup his losses. This worked. Well, it worked for a while anyway, long enough
for Leeson's boss to put him in charge of the bank's Futures and Options office in Singapore.
On January 16th, 1995, Leeson placed a short straddle in the Singapore
and Tokyo stock exchanges. Basically, he bet that the Japanese stock market
wouldn't move significantly overnight. He wasn't supposed to be doing this,
legally speaking, but he did it anyway. That night, the Kobe earthquake hit,
sending the market into a crazy tailspin and destroying Leeson's plan. He made a series of
increasingly risky bets to try and get the money back before anyone noticed, but nothing paid off.
Leeson left a note that read "I'm sorry" and fled Singapore to hide. He lost 1.4 billion
dollars of company money, and the bank never recovered. Leeson stayed on the run for a while,
moving to Malaysia, then Thailand, then Germany. But eventually, he was arrested and imprisoned.
To learn more about how Leeson basically hid his mistakes in a special "oops" account,
check out the full story in this video!
2 - Christine Lee In 2016, a Malaysian student named Christine
spent 4.6 million dollars someone deposited into her bank account. She thought the money was put
there by her parents. It wasn't. It was actually put there thanks to her bank fraud scheme.
Christine was a chemical engineering student studying in Australia. She
was arrested while trying to board a flight with an emergency issue passport
and charged with dishonestly obtaining financial advantage by deception
and knowingly dealing with the proceeds of crime—basically stealing and spending stolen
money. Saying that she thought her parents gave her the money is a pretty lousy excuse.
How did she do it exactly? She opened an account with Westpac bank, where she received regular
deposits that were actually from her parents. Her parents sent her enough money to live off
while she was a student, but not enough to live the crazy life of luxury she was after.
After realizing that the account had an unlimited overdraft policy, meaning
she could withdraw money that wasn't there, she took money out and sent it to herself on PayPal.
Over the next 7 months, she sent herself 4.6 million dollars, funneling some of it into two
different bank accounts. She used the money to go on shopping sprees, the biggest of which saw
her spending 300 thousand dollars in a single day. Eventually, she got a little too greedy. The bank
noticed something was weird when she transferred over a million dollars to PayPal in one day.
1 - Kelyn Spadoni Kelyn Spadoni was arrested in
April of 2021 and charged with theft, bank fraud, and the illegal transmission of monetary funds.
Those are some hefty charges. So, what did she actually do? Well, it wasn't entirely her fault.
Spadoni attempted to transfer 82 dollars into her bank account. But Charles Schaub, her financial
service company, accidentally transferred more than 1.2 million dollars. She should
have contacted the company and told them about the error. That's where she made a very illegal
mistake. Spadoni transferred the money to another bank account and then bought a new car and house.
However, her spending spree didn't last long, and the bank tried to take the money back.
She got fired from her job working as a 911 dispatcher. She is currently facing
civil charges because Schaub came after her with a case saying she
ignored their request to get the money back. Come on, who would want to give
back a million dollars? The company tried to get in touch with her on numerous occasions, but
she ignored them. She can't ignore them anymore, but at least she had a good run while it lasted.
Click to watch one of these next videos!
And let us know in the comment section
would you rather have 30k a month for life, or 5 million bucks right now?