US man jailed for $3m wire fraud

A US man involved in a $2.9 million wire fraud scam targeting Citi has been jailed for eight years.

Keith Singleton was convicted in September along with accomplice Eugene Watson for his part in the scam which also involved a Citi employee called Carin Seals.

Seals worked at Citi's global loan operations department in Delaware where she was responsible for ensuring that payments received from borrowers were properly transferred from a Citi account into those of the other participants involved in the transactions.

Between December 2006 and March 2007 she sent 17 wire transfers, worth $2.9 million, to accounts belonging to Watson, Singleton and Singleton's business, 'Papa's Perfect Pizza'.

To try to hide the theft, Seals made false notations on various Citi internal records to make it appear that the transfers were related to legitimate loan transactions.

Once the defendants or their associates received the wire transfers, they either quickly spent the money on luxury items or used it to pay off personal debt.

Singleton has been sentenced to eight years in federal prison and ordered to repay $2.3 million in restitution. Seals has already been jailed for four years and Watson for two.

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When companies lack the capability to either detect or prevent these kind of over-authorized users they introduce this type of risks. The challenge for these organizations is that it’s difficult to deal with large volumes and pick that single user out of many that has this conflicting set of access rights. Access Governance tooling that on a regular basis checks these potential Segregation of Duties and other violations would certainly help. Alternatively a structured Access Certification process would most likely have prevented this fraud and made the Manager aware of these conflicting access rights.