Hartford Man Who Participated in Bank Fraud Scheme Pleads Guilty

David B. Fein, United States Attorney for the District of Connecticut, announced that TROY MOODY, 41, of Hartford, pleaded guilty today before United States District Judge Janet Bond Arterton in New Haven to one count of conspiracy to commit bank fraud.

According to court documents and statements made in court, between April 2007 and January 2008, MOODY conspired with two Bank of America employees to steal business checks from the Bank of America lockbox processing center in East Hartford. The employees provided MOODY with at least three checks totaling approximately $390,000 that were stolen from the lockbox. MOODY and his co-conspirators then induced other women to register businesses in the names of the payees on the stolen business checks, open bank accounts in the names of those payees, deposit the stolen checks into the fraudulent accounts, and then to withdraw the proceeds of the stolen checks before the banks or merchants realized the checks had been stolen.

On June 18, 2010, a jury found MOODY, who had been charged by indictment, not guilty of three counts of bank fraud. However, the jury could not reach a verdict on one count of conspiracy to commit bank fraud. MOODY pleaded guilty to the conspiracy count today.

Judge Arterton has scheduled sentencing for September 30, 2010, at which time MOODY faces a maximum term of imprisonment of five years.

MOODY has been detained since his arrest by the State Capitol Police in November 2009.

At the time of his involvement in this conspiracy, MOODY was on supervised release from a previous federal bank fraud conviction. In March 2001, MOODY pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Hartford to one count of conspiracy to commit bank fraud and one count of bank fraud. On August 24, 2001, he was sentenced to 68 months of imprisonment, followed by five years of supervised release, and he was ordered to pay restitution in the amount of $436,361.

Today, Judge Arterton sentenced MOODY to approximately eight months of imprisonment, time served, for violating the terms of his supervised release.

This matter was investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and is being prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorneys David E. Novick and Paul H. McConnell.