Bank employee charged with stealing identities

CLEVELAND (WKBN) — An Illinois man was indicted in Ohio’s Northern District federal court on charges that he stole bank customers’ identities and used them for financial gain.

Yue Cao, 34, is charged with 17 counts including bank fraud, aggravated identity theft and engaging in monetary transactions in criminally derived property in connection with a scheme to steal funds from identity theft victims’ accounts at the bank where he worked.

In all, there were five victims named in the complaint.

Cao had been an employee of the bank since 2015 and worked as a modeling analyst.

Investigators said that between May 2022 and April 2023, Cao defrauded a Cleveland-based bank by transferring money from the five customer accounts to ones that Cao controlled at other institutions, including accounts he established in the customers’ names without their knowledge.

The bank is not identified in the indictment.

The indictment alleges that Cao targeted customers who had not enrolled in online banking services — each of them elderly, and one of whom had died in 2020. He is accused of creating email addresses for the customers without their knowledge and then enrolling them in online banking with the statements being sent to the email addresses Cao controlled.

He is accused of setting up at least $2.1 million in unauthorized online transfers from the victim’s accounts to the fraudulent accounts he set up.

Online court records do not yet list Cao’s first court appearance.

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