A former personal banker at Bank of America pleaded not guilty today in Middlesex Superior Court to charges that she allegedly stole more than $2.1 million from 31 investors and customers, many of whom were her own friends and family.
Elaina Patterson, 53 of Wilmington, was arraigned on 15 counts of larceny over $250 from a person over 60 and 16 counts of larceny over $250.
Attorney General Martha Coakley’s office launched an investigation in November 2011 after Bank of America referred the office during its initial internal investigation. Patterson allegedly initially persuaded her family and friends to invest in accounts that she told them offered high interest rates, between 10 and 15 percent.
Authorities said Patterson told her family and friends that these accounts were exclusively for high-level investors and corporations, but she could set up these accounts for family and friends because of her position at the bank.
Patterson convinced 15 family members and friends to invest almost $4.5 million and issued them fake certificate of deposit receipts and Form 1099s on bank forms to make those investments seem legitimate, authorities said.
According to the attorney general, in a number of instances, Patterson set up accounts in investors’ names without their knowledge, put her own address on the accounts, deposited the investors’ funds and used the money both to fund payments to other investors and to funnel money into her personal accounts.
Patterson worked at a bank branch in Reading, which was first Bank of Boston, then Fleet Bank and then Bank of America. Authorities said she carried out her scheme between July 1999 and September 2011.
Beginning in 2009, authorities said Patterson started stealing money from customers’ accounts, many of them elderly, so she could conceal her previous theft from investors. According to the attorney general’s office, Patterson stole almost $1.5 million from 16 different customers by forging signatures on withdrawal slips. She allegedly used about $400,000 of this amount to repay customers stolen from earlier in the scheme and the majority of the balance of that stolen money to fund "interest payments" and other payments to the investors.
Altogether, authorities say Patterson conducted around $6 million worth of fraudulent transactions, paying back $3.8 million to customers and investors and leaving the total net theft at more than $2.1 million.
She returns to court on Aug. 14 for a pre-trial conference.
