WHEELING, W.Va. – A former teller of defunct N&W Poca Division FCU on Monday was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison for her role in a family fraud that drained as much as $5 million from the tiny credit union.
Pamela Mullins, 46, confessed to creating fictitious deposits into her checking account and posting fictitious payments on loans she secured from the credit union. Her cousin, 36-year-old Rebecca Poe, who is the daughter of the credit union’s CEO, in July was sentenced to more than four years in prison for her role in the massive embezzlement.
Both women were ordered to pay $2.4 million in restitution to NCUA, which liquidated the one-time $7 million credit union in late 2008 after the fraud was discovered. The credit union, located in Bluefield, W.Va., was chartered in 1970 to serve employees of the Norfolk and Western Railway, and later added employees of American Electric Power Co. (formerly Appalachian Power Co.).
The credit union’s CEO Deborah Bailey, who is Poe’s mother and Mullins’ aunt, has not been named in the criminal case but was charged in a civil suit brought by NCUA with engineering the scheme. NCUA claims Bailey, her husband and their daughters stole the money by making fake deposits into their accounts and manipulating phony loans.
The fictitious deposits scheme began small and grew steadily, according to NCUA, to as much as $14,000 a month in 2002. The suit also claims the credit union made hundreds of thousands of dollars in debits on behalf of the family members which were never posted to their accounts.
