OKLAHOMA CITY – An employee of a trust bank was sentenced to two and a half years in federal prison for wire fraud and signing a false federal income tax return in connection with a $2.3 million embezzlement.
Jordan Glen Young, 38, of Oklahoma City, “abused the trust placed in him … by stealing … from trust accounts through repeated diversions of funds for his personal benefit over more than a four-year period,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Robert J. Troester.
Young used the stolen proceeds to make mortgage payments and to finance vacations, cars and clothing, investigators discovered.
Subsequently Young “compounded his greed” by failing to pay the Internal Revenue Service more than $500,000 in taxes owed on the illegal income, Troester said.
Four days before Christmas last year Young was charged with one count of wire fraud and one count of filing a false federal income tax return.
From 2006 through March 2020 Young worked at an Oklahoma City trust bank as a trust administrative officer. He managed trust accounts and distributed funds from those accounts to the beneficiaries as needed.
He made approximately 100 unauthorized distributions from trust accounts to his personal bank accounts, investigators learned.
To disguise his scheme Young entered false comments in the bank’s internal records, such as “distribution to maintain minimum balance” or wrote that the distribution was paid to the beneficiary’s “Guardianship.” The funds were intended to be used by a guardian “to pay expenses related to the beneficiary’s care,” the federal charge reads.
Young pleaded guilty to making an unauthorized $60,706 distribution to his personal checking account from a trust account he was managing in October 2018. He also admitted that he embezzled funds from his former employer from December 2015 through March 2020, and stipulated that the total loss to the trust bank from his embezzlement scheme was $2,323,036.91.
In addition to committing wire fraud, Young also pleaded guilty to signing a false federal income tax return.
He acknowledged that he signed a personal federal income tax return for the 2018 calendar year that he knew was false because it reported only $114,439 in total income. At the plea hearing Young admitted that he omitted on the 2018 tax return thousands of dollars of income embezzled from the trust bank.
Earlier this month, Chief U.S. District Judge Timothy DeGiusti sentenced Young to 30 months of imprisonment, followed by three years of supervised release. DeGiusti also ordered Young to make full restitution to the trust bank and to pay the IRS $500,822 in taxes owed. Young must report to federal prison on September 8.