Ana Dalila Vega told Secret Service agents she could not meet with them on Thursday or Friday. She said her car was stuck in the shop. She hoped to have it back from the mechanics by the following week.
What Vega failed to mention, according to the recently released indictment, was that she had already booked a one-way ticket to Nicaragua departing the same day with no return flight.
What she did not know, however, was that the Department of Homeland Security had already flagged that one-way flight to investigators weeks earlier.
Instead of boarding the plane that day, she was arrested by federal agents for a massive fraud scheme against her employer, Citibank.
“The Less You Know, The Better”
By all accounts, Vega was considered a model employee. At least for a while.
She worked as a personal banker at Citibank from 2017 until January 2024. Her job included opening accounts, adding authorized signers, and processing wire transfers for customers who visited the branch in person.
The trouble for her began in March 2023, when a man she knew from her apartment building asked her for help. She told investigators he was a drug dealer and that he found out that she worked for the bank. She told them he wanted some help “unblocking accounts” and adding new cardholders to certain accounts.
When she asked him why, he simply replied, “The less you know, the better”. She eventually agreed to work with him as his inside accomplice – unblocking frozen accounts, adding unauthorized signers, and processing wire transfers for people she knew were fraud.
$1.3 Million Gone In 4 Days
The first fraudulent wire transfer occurred in March 2023, when Vega processed a $60,000 wire transfer to the account named “Get The Bread LLC”. She told investigators the company name stuck out to her.
By December, the scheme had gotten way bigger. A woman showed up at Vega’s branch trying to access a New York man’s account. Vega turned her away at first because the woman showed a woman’s ID for an account belonging to a man.
The woman then came back the next day with a man who had an ID matching the account holder’s name. This time, Vega let it go through and added the woman as a signer on the account. Within six days, the woman wired about $1.3 million out of the account to a personal brokerage and a Bank of America account under a Nevada shell company.
Business Is Business
For helping the drug dealer move more than one million dollars, Vega was paid a measly $3,000 to $4,000 in cash.
Text messages included in the indictment showed she was unhappy about the crummy pay. In one exchange with the drug dealer, she wrote that they had agreed on a number, that he came up short, and that he was “not a man of word.” She added: “Business is business.”
Not An Isolated Incident At Citibank?
The complaint reveals a strange connection between the drug dealer and another Citibank case.
She told investigators the drug dealer once sent her a press release about a Miami man arrested for a nearly identical scheme targeting Citibank customers. The man had stolen $2 million taking over customer accounts. The drug dealer warned her to be careful.
Vega told investigators she had once seen the drug dealer with the man claiming that he was probably involved with a much broader fraud scheme.
