TD insider pleads guilty in $3.4M account fraud

• Key insight: Lam's scheme stole directly from TD customers' accounts, unlike the year's earlier TD insider cases, which moved drug money for outside laundering networks.
• What's at stake: TD absorbs the losses, reimbursing customers like the one drained of $417,300, while a federal probe of its own employees stays open.
• Supporting data: Lam facilitated more than $3.4 million in fraud and took at least $155,000 in bribes; he agreed to pay $3.4 million in restitution and accept a permanent ban from banking.

Overview bullets generated by AI with editorial review.

A former TD Bank employee has pleaded guilty to feeding his customers' account information to a crew that drained their balances. He is the fifth former TD worker to admit to a job-related crime in a New Jersey federal court this year.

Cheungkin Lam, 28, who went by "Kelvin," pleaded guilty May 27 in federal court in Newark to conspiracy to commit wire fraud affecting a financial institution and to making false bank entries, according to a press release from the Justice Department and his plea agreement.

Together, the two schemes to which he admitted facilitated more than $3.4 million in fraud, and he took at least $155,000 in bribes along the way.

Lam's scheme differed from the other TD insider cases this year; his ring stole directly from the bank's own customers. The employees who pleaded guilty previously had helped move drug money for laundering networks.

In one case, Lam's ring cleaned out about $417,300 from a single customer's account, a loss TD covered by paying the customer back.

For banks, the TD cases have become a lesson in insider risk. Employees with ordinary credentials can become a single point of failure when monitoring is thin.

In this case, all Lam needed was everyday authorizations to pull account reports, check balances and pass along customer details.

Lam is only the latest name in a string of cases that traces back to TD's record money-laundering guilty plea in 2024.

How Lam worked it from the inside

Lam was a financial service representative at a TD branch in the Fresh Meadows section of Queens, New York. From January to May 2021, he used his bank credentials to find money worth stealing, according to the charging document filed against him.

He made unauthorized account inquiries and emailed his supervisors asking for the monthly "large balance reports" that flagged the branch's wealthiest accounts.

For about $146,000 in bribes, Lam handed that confidential account information to outside co-conspirators, who took over the accounts and pulled out the money, according to prosecutors.

The roughly $417,300 drained from one customer over two days in March 2021 was the largest single hit.

In all, the ring tried to steal about $6.5 million from TD customers and succeeded in taking roughly $3.4 million, the charging document said.

A second bank, and the insider he bribed

Lam's second scheme moved the fraud into another bank, which prosecutors did not name in his charging document.

In May 2022, Lam bribed an insider at that unnamed Manhattan national bank to falsify its records. The conduct is behind the false-bank-entries charge against Lam.

That Manhattan bank insider was Edward Low, who went by "Eddie." Low had been one of Lam's co-conspirators at TD in 2021. By 2022, he had taken a job at the second, unnamed bank.

For a bribe, Low opened a sham business account under the name "Late Night Bistro Inc," registered to a straw owner, and helped use it to launder about $47,000. Lam kept a cut of roughly $9,000.

Low pleaded guilty in February; his sentencing is scheduled for July 14.

The plea terms and what comes next

Lam pleaded guilty to both charges against him, each of which carries a maximum 30-year prison term. He agreed to pay roughly $3.4 million in restitution to TD Bank and roughly $47,000 to a second victim. He also agreed to forfeit the $155,000 he took in bribes.

The maximum terms overstate his likely sentence. The guidelines calculation in his plea agreement points to a realistic term of roughly 33 to 51 months.

Lam also agreed to a permanent ban from working in banking, and acknowledged that his conviction will likely lead to his deportation.

U.S. District Judge Esther Salas is scheduled to sentence him Oct. 15.

One bank, five guilty pleas

Five former TD employees have now pleaded guilty in the same New Jersey federal court this year to crimes they committed on the job.

Wilfredo Aquino, Oscar Nunez-Flores and Leonardo Ayala pleaded guilty in January; Low pleaded on Feb. 17 and Lam on May 27. A sixth former employee, Jhonnatan Rodriguez, pleaded guilty to insider fraud in 2025.

The string of cases traces back to TD's own guilty plea in October 2024, when it became the first U.S. bank to plead guilty to conspiring to launder money.

The bank agreed to pay more than $1.8 billion, the largest penalty ever under the Bank Secrecy Act, the nation's main anti-money-laundering law.

The government found that TD failed to monitor 92% of its transaction volume, equating to some $18.3 trillion. Prosecutors also found that its controls were weak enough to let three laundering networks move more than $670 million through the bank.

One of those networks, prosecutors said, had help from five TD employees.

This year's guilty pleas constitute the Justice Department working through the people behind those failures.

TD is operating under a cap on its U.S. assets and an independent monitor as it spends more than $1 billion to overhaul its anti-money-laundering program.

A TD spokesperson said Tuesday that the bank cooperated with the investigation into Lam.

"We remain committed to working with our partners in the government and across the industry to prevent, detect, and deter fraudulent activity," the spokesperson said.

TD's 2024 guilty plea requires the bank to keep cooperating with the government's investigation, which remained open as of January.