Former BNY Mellon Employee Sentenced to Prison, Ordered to Pay Restitution for Embezzling $452,000

PITTSBURGH, PA—A resident of Pittsburgh, Pa., has been sentenced in federal court to 33 months in prison and to pay restitution of $450,037.06, followed by five years’ supervised release on her conviction of embezzlement, United States Attorney David J. Hickton announced today.

Senior United States District Judge Maurice B. Cohill imposed the sentence on Danielle M. Keane, 38.

According to information presented to the court, Keane was an employee of BNY Mellon bank in charge of administering a pension fund for McDermott, Inc, from downtown Pittsburgh. Keane was employed as a Data Entry Associate and a Trust Operations Coordinator. BNY Mellon is a bank whose deposits are insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. For a period of three years between April 30, 2007 and Aug. 1, 2010, Keane would utilize her position and access to create unauthorized checks drawn on the accounts of pensioners. Keane would then use her knowledge of internal routing procedure to divert these checks to herself so that they wouldn’t be mailed to the pensioners, and the pensioners would not know that they were issued. Keane would then endorse the checks and deposit the checks into her bank account. Keane would also wire transfer money in the form of direct deposit from these pension accounts directly into her bank account, so that the depositing bank would not question her on the reason why the checks she was depositing were not in her name. To conceal the fraud, Keane took the additional step of entering an “adjustment” into the pensioner’s account ledger, making it look like the money that was drawn by the unauthorized check was re-credited back into the pension account, and the pensioner would be lead to believe that there was more money in her account than there actually was due to Keane’s theft. These actions would cover up the payments from tax reporting documents of the pensioners, so that the pensioners would not be alerted at the end of the year (when they received their tax forms) of the excess amount taken from their accounts, which Kean was stealing. A forensic accounting has discovered that Keane fraudulently issued approximately 168 checks and 71 wire transfers totaling approximately $452,037.06 of money that was entrusted to the care and custody of BNY Mellon.

Assistant United States Attorney James T. Kitchen prosecuted this case on behalf of the government.

U.S. Attorney Hickton commended the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Employee Benefit’s Security Administration of the Department of Labor for the investigation leading to the successful prosecution of Keane.