A business owner from Springfield, MO, was sentenced to a two year prison sentence on March 24 for a bank fraud scheme involving the construction of his $1.6 million home and the falsification of records related to his business, according to KY3 News in Springfield.
Last October, Michael Ussery, 58, was convicted by a jury of his peers on 12 counts of bank fraud.
Ussery was the owner of two successful businesses, USS Properties and Villa Properties. In 2007, he took out loans to purchase real estate he each intended to develop residential properties on.
But Ussery was also using the money to construct an enormous $1.6 million home for himself in Bois D’Arc.
Courts found that Ussery was manipulating records and manipulating the outcome of procedures, which were aimed at determining the actual value of his businesses.
This directly impacted the level of financial support and regulatory scrutiny his business’s investments would be subject to from the banks.
Banks typically determine the value of a business using three key factors. In summation, sales compared to sales of similar businesses, earning power and risk assessment history, and assets are the “big three.”
Ussery falls accused of falsifying records at his businesses, which gave banks an overinflated impression of his net worth, thus causing them to provide financial support he would have otherwise not been entitled to.
The case from Springfield is only representative of a much more pressing, larger issue. American banks are frequently becoming the target of both domestic and foreign attacks, scams, and frauds, which send shockwaves throughout the American economy and could have dire consequences on the integrity of our financial system.
Last month, one of the largest cyber heists of all time was carried out from where investigators are saying is Bangladesh. The attack targeted the New York Federal Reserve.
While a spelling error ultimately caused the bank’s automatic safeguards to halt the transactions, The Guardian reported that the hackers were able to get away with upwards of $80 million. Their intended benchmark was to steal over $1 billion.
