Wells Fargo Sues an Employee It Accuses of Stealing $500,000

The FBI is investigating accusations that a former Wells Fargo Bank employee embezzled more than half a million dollars from the bank’s trust department in Los Angeles over a period of 2 1/2 years.

Tai Thi Tran, a 39-year-old Vietnamese widow, has been accused by the bank in a civil lawsuit of altering 57 cashier’s checks to divert $569,156 to the bank account of two people with whom she lived in Monterey Park, Phung Minh Lam and his wife, Hien Ngoc Tran. The bank said $450,000 was used by the three to buy property in the Los Angeles area and that the remainder is missing.

Court papers said the evidence was turned over to the FBI. FBI spokesman Jim Neilson confirmed Wednesday that the alleged embezzlement is under investigation. Neilson declined to identify any suspects because no criminal charges have been filed.

Wells Fargo’s civil suit, filed late last month in Los Angeles Superior Court, names as defendants Tai Thi Tran, Lam, Hien Ngoc Tran and Tokai Bank of California, where Lam and his wife had an account. The suit seeks the return of the money and a total of $15 million in punitive damages.

The suit claims that the scheme began in December, 1984, and continued until shortly before Tai Thi Tran was laid off on May 1 as part of cutbacks in her department. She was working at Crocker National Bank when the alleged scheme started and joined Wells Fargo when the banks merged last year.

The bank said it discovered the diversion in early July as the trust departments of the two banks were being integrated.

Disclosing the procedure allegedly used to manipulate the bank’s internal operations and to create the checks would jeopardize security at Wells Fargo and possibly at other institutions, an bank spokesman said.

The suit said, however, that legitimate checks were altered and made payable to Lam, who then returned some of the money to Tai Thi Tran. She deposited it in her own bank account, according to the suit. The amounts of the altered checks listed by the bank were relatively small in the beginning, around $5,000 per check, but eventually reached $45,733.