Bank fraud is the use of potentially illegal means to obtain money, assets, or other property owned or held by a financial institution, or to obtain money from depositors by fraudulently posing as a bank or other financial institution. In many instances, bank fraud is a criminal offence. While the specific elements of particular banking fraud laws vary depending on jurisdictions, the term bank fraud applies to actions that employ a scheme or artifice, as opposed to bank robbery or theft. For this reason, bank fraud is sometimes considered a white-collar crime.
Types of bank fraud
Accounting fraud
In order to hide serious financial problems, some businesses have been known to use fraudulent bookkeeping to overstate sales and income, inflate the worth of the company's assets, or state a profit when the company is operating at a loss. These tampered records are then used to seek investment in the company's bond or security issues or to make fraudulent loan applications in a final attempt to obtain more money to delay the inevitable collapse of an unprofitable or mismanaged firm. Examples of accounting frauds include the Enron scandal, World Com and Ocala Funding. These companies "cooked the books" in order to appear as though they had profits each quarter, when in fact they were deeply in debt.
Demand draft fraud
Demand draft (DD) fraud typically involves one or more corrupt bank employees. Firstly, such employees remove a few DD leaves or DD books from stock and write them like a regular DD. Since they are insiders, they know the coding and punching of a demand draft. Such fraudulent demand drafts are usually drawn payable at a distant city without debiting an account. The draft is cashed at the payable branch. The fraud is discovered only when the bank's head office does the branch-wide reconciliation, which normally take six months, by which time the money is gone.
Remotely created check fraud
Remotely created checks are orders of payment created by the payee and authorized by the customer remotely, using a telephone or the internet by providing the required information including the MICR code from a valid check. They do not bear the signatures of the customers like ordinary cheques. Instead, they bear a legend statement "Authorized by Drawer". This type of instrument is usually used by credit card companies, utility companies, or telemarketers. The lack of signature makes them susceptible to fraud. The fraud is considered Demand Draft fraud in the US.
Uninsured deposits
A bank soliciting public deposits may be uninsured or not licensed to operate at all. The objective is usually to solicit for deposits to this uninsured "bank," although some may also sell stock representing ownership of the "bank." Sometimes the names appear very official or very similar to those of legitimate banks. For instance, the unlicensed "Chase Trust Bank" of Washington D.C. appeared in 2002, bearing no affiliation to its seemingly apparent namesake; the real Chase Manhattan Bank is based in New York. Accounting fraud has also been used to conceal other theft taking place within a company.
Bill discounting fraud
Essentially a confidence trick, a fraudster uses a company at their disposal to gain the bank's confidence, by posing as a genuine, profitable customer. To give the illusion of being a desired customer, the company regularly and repeatedly uses the bank to get payment from one or more of its customers. These payments are always made, as the customers in question are part of the fraud, actively paying any and all bills the bank attempts to collect. After the fraudster has gained the bank's trust, the company requests that the bank begin paying the company up front for bills it will collect from the customers later. Many banks will agree but are not likely to go whole hog right away. So again, business continues as normal for the fraudulent company, its fraudulent customers, and the unwitting bank. As the bank grows more comfortable with the arrangement, it will trust the company more and more and be willing to give it larger and larger sums of money up front. Eventually, when the outstanding balance between the bank and the company is sufficiently large, the company and its customers disappear, taking the money the bank paid up front and leaving no one to pay the bills issued by the bank.