Apparently Gary Foster “used his knowledge of bank operations” to get the job done.
Foster, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New York, is being charged with embezzling more than $19 million from Citigroup. He was arrested Sunday morning at JFK Airport when he arrived on a flight from Bangkok, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said in a news release.
According to a court case against him, Foster is charged with transferring money from Citigroup accounts into a cash account and then he wired the money into his personal account at another bank. Foster caused an incorrect contract or deal number to be placed in the wire transfer instructions to hide his activities, the DOJ said.
Let this be a lesson to those considering taking a page from Foster (or brother from another mother Jim Glover)’s playabook- attention to detail counts!
Update: from the complaint:
Mr. Foster, who supervised a derivatives unit, was based in the bank’s office tower in Long Island City. He worked in the internal treasury finance department, which funds loans and other business transactions inside Citigroup.
In a series of eight transfers, between July and December 2010, about $900,000 of the money he allegedly took came from the bank’s interest expense account, while an additional $14.3 million came from its debt adjustment account, the complaint said. The transactions went unnoticed until a recent audit, a Citigroup investigator told the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the complaint says. In one transfer cited by the authorities, he allegedly wired himself $3.9 million on Nov. 8, 2010. Mr. Foster allegedly put phony contract or deal numbers in the reference lines for his wire transfers to make them look like they were for legitimate contracts.
Former Citigroup Official Arrested for Bank Fraud [Deal Journal]
Former Citi Exec Charged In $19 Million Theft [WSJ]
Alright so when the sub routine compounds the interest it uses all these
extra decimal places that just get rounded off. So we simplified the
whole thing, we rounded them all down, and dropped the remainder… into an
account we opened.
CITI had $19MM? Thats the real story here!
What’s a wire transfer?
JOANNA
So you’re stealing.
PETER
Ah, no. No. You don’t understand. It’s, uh, very complicated. It’s, uh,
it’s, it’s aggregate so I’m talking about fractions of a cent that, uh,
over time, they add up to a lot.
JOANNA
Ok. So you’re gonna make a lot of money, right?
PETER
Yeah.
JOANNA
Ok. That’s not yours?
PETER
Well, it, it becomes ours.
JOANNA
How’s that not stealing?
PETER
I don’t think, I don’t think I’m explaining this very well. Um, this
Seven Eleven, right? If you take a penny from the tray -
JOANNA
From the crippled children?!
PETER
No, that’s the tray. I’m talking about the tray. The penny’s for
everybody.
JOANNA
Oh, for everybody. Ok.
PETER
Yeah, well, those are whole pennies.
JOANNA
Yeah.
PETER
Right. I’m just talking about fractions of a penny here, but we do it
from a much bigger tray. A couple of million times. So what’s wrong
with that?
JOANNA
It seems wrong.
PETER
It’s not wrong. Initech is wrong. CITIGROUP is an evil corporation, all
right? Chotchkie’s is wrong. Doesn’t it bother you that you have to get
up in the morning and put on pieces of flair?
JOANNA
Yeah, but I’m not about to go in and start taking money from the
register!
PETER
You know, the Nazis had pieces of flair but they made the Jews wear
them.
JOANNA
What?!
PETER
Look, we don’t – I, I – we don’t have to talk about this. Let’s just go
to the barbecue, all right?
JOANNA
Ok.
(Nervous laughter)
TL;DR
Coming back from Bangkok??? Did he forget his ATM card at home?
Wait – he MADE 19 million? Where the hell have we been hiding this guy?
- Vik
Thinking they ought to be arresting Chuck “Musical Chairs” Prince who cost the bank a lot more. Might as well throw in Pandit, too, for his fund’s performance post acquisition.
Hey Peter man! Check our Channel 9! Check out this chick!
i was only doing what Sandy asked me to do, this way it would be a black mark against Chuck
PC LOAD LETTER. WTF DOES THAT MEAN?!
Does he have to pay income tax on the full amount?
So how does he have the authority to wire money from any account at Citi to his personal account at another bank? Even with a bogus deal number, this seems pretty prosaic. What if someone smart attempted to steal money. Would they ever get caught?
shut the FUCK up Donny
140 characters or less please
19 million? Tier 1 wiped out .
Someone smart would have to take a job at a Citi before anyone has to worry about that.
DB is putting up old news. I saw this guy’s arrest in Hangover 2 after he survived a drug overdose.
DB is putting up old news. I saw this guy’s arrest in Hangover 2 after he survived a drug overdose.
why would they develop their own phone, and thus ctopeme with mobile operators, when they could just put NFC payments on a card like eg. Oyster+Barclaycard?i guess you can in theory do more, but how much more does a bank need to do than enable payments
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