Article

Former BofA employee sentenced for using malware to steal cash from the bank's ATMs

The thefts occurred from March 20 to October 11, 2009, in Mecklenburg County, N.C. and elsewhere.

May 23, 2011

A U.S. District Court judge in North Carolina has sentenced a former Bank of America Corp. IT employee to 27 months in a federal prison after he pled guilty to installing malware on the bank's ATM network and stealing $284,750 from the machines in eight months.

Judge Frank D. Whitney on Thursday also ordered Rodney Reed Caverly, 54, to pay Bank of America $419,310.90 in restitution, according to court documents.

The amount includes $284,750 Caverly admitted to stealing from Bank of America's ATMs. The repayment also includes the $134,750.90 it cost employees to remove the malware from the bank's ATM network. In addition, there were $490 in other undisclosed fines. U.S. Secret Service agents recovered $167,010 in stolen cash from the ATM thefts. Bank of America, which operates the nation's largest bank-owned ATM network with 17,886 machines, is based in Charlotte, N.C.

Thomas A. O'Malley, assistant U.S. Attorney for Western District of North Carolina, charged that Caverly, a Bank of America employee hired to maintain and design computer systems utilized for conducting financial transactions at the bank's ATMs, installed the malware in the bank's computer system.

"Caverly deployed a malicious computer code to Bank of America's protected computers and computerized ATMs for the purpose of causing the affected ATMs to make fraudulent and unauthorized disbursements of cash without any transactional computer record of the disbursements," O'Malley wrote in an April 1, 2010, court filing in the U.S. District Court in Charlotte.
 
The thefts occurred from March 20, 2009, to October 11, 2009, in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, and elsewhere, according to court documents.

On April 13, 2010, Caverly pled guilty to one count of fraudulent access of a protected computer before a United States Magistrate in Charlotte.

After Caverly is released from prison, he will spend two years on supervised release.