File this one under nice try: The U.S. Supreme Court today ruled against a man who argued stealing $300,000 of an acquaintance’s bank deposits didn’t fit the definition of bank fraud. His reasoning? The bank itself didn’t lose a dime.
The Supreme Court not surprisingly rejected that argument in Shaw v. U.S., ruling unanimously that the federal bank-fraud statute, which outlaws any “scheme to defraud a financial institution,” also outlaws schemes to defraud a customer by stealing the money he has on deposit at the bank. Since banks use deposits to fund loans, the money that technically belongs to depositors also belongs to the bank.
In this case Laurence Shaw was convicted of using account information to surreptitiously steal hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Bank of America account of Stanley Hsu, a Taiwanese business who employed the mother of Shaw’s girlfriend and perhaps unwisely had his U.S. bank statements sent to Shaw’s house. Shaw moved the money to a PayPal account in Hsu’s name and then on to bank accounts he set up in other people’s names. (Hsu, for whatever reason, didn’t examine his statements on a regular basis.)
READ MORE: Surprise: Stealing $300,000 In Deposits Is Bank Fraud, Supreme Court Rules