Megan Lea Dougherty was employed at the Fayette branch of Exchange Bank of Missouri. Ms. Dougherty engaged in a scheme to embezzle money from Exchange Bank of Missouri from 2008 to 2023.
Ms. Dougherty began working in the bank’s IT and customer service department in 2008 and began removing small amounts of money from customer bank accounts into her own savings account and then to her checking account. As the scheme progressed, Ms. Dougherty also transferred stolen funds into the checking accounts of family members. To conceal her scheme, Ms. Dougherty would change which accounts she took funds from and falsified the description of these transfers in the bank’s computer systems.
After the scheme was uncovered, Ms. Dougherty told investigators she targeted customers who knew and trusted her. The scheme allowed Ms. Dougherty to embezzle a total of $2,393,288 from customers’ accounts. A large reason why the scheme was able to succeed was due to a lack of internal controls, according to comments Ms. Dougherty made to investigators, and when she saw these deficiencies, the scheme was off to a quick start. One thing that might have prevented Ms. Dougherty’s theft would be creating a system that required approval from both the bank and the customer for a bank employee to initiate transfers.
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