First things first: I’ve taken a bit of a hiatus recently and haven’t posted anything for the last six days. I’ve been pretty busy with work, not to mention the IT nerds at my firm decided to block my own domain. I’m working with them now to get it sorted out but, until then, we’ll be doing limited posts from my phone or during the evening.
Now that we have that out of the way, lets take a second to bask in the glory that is Kam Wong, CEO of Municipal Credit Union (MCU), who has no grasp on how to commit bank fraud or what to do with the ill-gotten gains:
There are two main takeaways from this story. The first is that Kam Wong is either a woefully inept CEO, or he’s a woefully inept criminal – and I’m going with both here. Forget that he embezzled over $6M from his own company, the way he pulled it off is next level stupid. The guy was running your standard insurance fraud racket in order to collect cash on $6M worth of bogus dental and long term disability claims. So what did he do when he had the money – well, withdraw $1.9M from ATMs via 2,592 transactions and write over 200 checks to a bodega in Elmont, NY. You would think a banking CEO would be able to cook up a better way to embezzle and launder money than that.
The second takeaway and obviously the most important, is that Kam blew almost $4M of the money on…
Lotto tickets. You remember those bodega checks he was writing? Yeah, he wrote all of them to the bodega in order to feed his insatiable scratch off habit. Here’s The Post:
“In a weird twist, about $3.9 million of the ill-gotten gains allegedly went to fund a “lottery habit” near his office and his home in Valley Stream, Long Island.
Wong, who made more than $684,000 a year, wrote 216 checks to two bodegas and withdrew $1.9 million from ATMs a total of 2,592 times for the lottery tickets — sometimes multiple times a day, according to the complaint.
On weekends, Wong “spent hours … purchasing and playing lottery tickets,” according to the Justice Department complaint filed by Manhattan US attorney Geoffrey S.”
What a weird guy! I just can’t wrap my brain around buying $4M worth of lotto tickets. Did he play 200,000 twenty dollar games or 4,000,000 one dollar games? How much did he actually win on them? How upset is the bodega owner who just lost his $4M scratch off customer? Why did a CEO clearing almost $700K a year live in Valley Stream and hang out in Elmont? I doubt we’ll ever know the answers, but if you think I’ll ever stop searching for them, you’re probably right. I’ll definitely enjoy myself a nice chuckle when I see a headline buried in the “Local” section of the NY papers when he gets sentenced. That’s it, though.
But seriously, thoughts and prayers to the bodega. They’ll need to sling a whole lot of these bad boys to make up for the Kam Wong revenue shortfall going forward:
