A Bergen County woman was sentenced today to 81 months in prison for embezzling more than $1 million while she worked at a bank in Fort Lee, New Jersey, U.S. Attorney Paul J. Fishman announced.
Miye Chon, a/k/a/ “Karen Chon,” 36, of Englewood Cliffs, previously pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge William H. Walls to Counts One, Two, and 29 of a superseding indictment charging her with bank fraud, embezzlement or misapplication of funds by a bank officer or employee, and aggravated identity theft. Judge Walls imposed the sentence today in Newark federal court.
According to documents filed in this case and statements made in court:
Chon was employed by BankAsiana, a federally insured financial institution, as an operations officer and later as an assistant vice president and operations officer at the Fort Lee branch until the bank was acquired by Wilshire Bank in October 2013. Chon had access to customer accounts and the bank’s internal account records, computer system and vault. Over several years, Chon stole more than $1 million from BankAsiana’s customer accounts by regularly making unauthorized transfers from customer certificate of deposit (CD) accounts into BankAsiana’s vault cash account and then physically removing cash from the bank’s vault.
Chon accomplished this scheme on dozens of occasions, typically taking tens of thousands of dollars at a time. One time, she converted $100,000 from a customer’s CD account. As part of the scheme, Chon also opened up a bank account in an individual’s name and forged checks using that individual’s name without permission.
In addition to the prison term, Judge Walls sentenced Chon to two years of supervised release and ordered her to pay restitution of $1,350,081.
For more information on the task force, please visit www.StopFraud.gov