Bank fraud is generally defined as planning to obtain property or money from any federally insured financial institution. Bank fraud may be charged to both bank insiders or outside companies or individuals. Toledo Attorney Mark A. Davis focuses her bank fraud criminal defense representation on insider bank fraud.

Insider bank fraud may include criminal charges for:

• Rogue Tradeing

• Fraudulent Loans

• Wire Fraud

• Forged or Fraudulent Documents

• Uninsured Deposits

• Theft of Identity

• Demand Draft Fraud

Rogue Trader

A rogue trader is a highly placed insider nominally authorized to invest sizeable funds on behalf of the bank; this trader secretly makes progressively more aggressive and risky investments using the bank's money, when one investment goes bad, the rogue trader engages in further market speculation in the hope of a quick profit which would hide or cover the loss.

Unfortunately, when one investment loss is piled onto another, the costs to the bank can reach into the hundreds of millions of dollars; there have even been cases in which a bank goes out of business due to market investment losses.

Fraudulent loans

One way to remove money from a bank is to take out a loan, a practice bankers would be more than willing to encourage if they know that the money will be repaid in full with interest. A fraudulent loan, however, is one in which the borrower is a business entity controlled by a dishonest bank officer or an accomplice; the "borrower" then declares bankruptcy or vanishes and the money is gone. The borrower may even be a non-existent entity and the bank loan merely an artifice to conceal a theft of a large sum of money from the bank.

Wire fraud

Wire transfer networks are tempting targets as a wire transfer, once made, is difficult or impossible to reverse. As these networks are used by banks to settle accounts with each other, rapid or overnight wire transfer of large amounts of money are commonplace; while banks have put checks and balances in place, there is the risk that insiders may attempt to use fraudulent or forged documents which claim to request a bank depositor's money be wired to another bank, often an offshore account in some distant foreign country.

Forged or fraudulent documents

Forged documents are often used to conceal other thefts; banks tend to count their money meticulously so every penny must be accounted for. A document claiming that a sum of money has been borrowed as a loan, withdrawn or transferred by an individual depositor or invested, can therefore be valuable to a thief who wishes to conceal the minor detail that the bank's money has in fact been stolen and is now gone

Uninsured Deposits

There are a number of cases each year where the bank itself turns out to 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.

There is a very high risk of fraud when dealing with unknown or uninsured institutions.

Theft of Identity

Dishonest bank personnel have been known to disclose depositors' personal information for use in theft of identity frauds. The perpetrators then use the information to obtain identity cards and credit cards using the victim's name and personal information.

Demand Draft Fraud

Demand draft fraud is usually done by one or more dishonest bank employees. They remove few demand draft leaves or demand draft books from stock and write them like a regular demand draft. Since they are insiders, they know the coding, punching of a demand draft. These demand drafts will be issued payable at distant geographic location without debiting an account. Then it will be cashed at the payable branch. For the paying branch it is just another demand draft. This kind of fraud will be discovered only when the head office does the branch-wise reconciliation, which normally will take 6 months. By that time the money is unrecoverable.

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