Investment banker and husband sentenced for stealing £61,000 from ATM

An investment banker and her husband have been handed suspended jail sentences after admitting stealing £61,400 from a faulty HSBC cash machine in Essex.

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Investment banker and husband sentenced for stealing £61,000 from ATM

Editorial

This content has been selected, created and edited by the Finextra editorial team based upon its relevance and interest to our community.

Former Northern Trust banker Joanne Jones, 33, discovered last year that the ATM, located at a Waitrose supermarket in Billericay, paid out even though she was overdrawn, with the withdrawals not showing up on her HSBC statement, Basildon crown court heard.

From March last year, Jones and her husband Darren visited the cash machine to make over 300 withdrawals in 88 days. On one day they took £1250 in five minutes, while on another occasion they withdrew £2400 in 10 minutes, the court heard.

According to press reports, the couple were caught after HSBC, suspecting cash delivery guards from Group 4 Security of stealing the money, installed CCTV cameras.

The reason for the fault with the machine, which has since been fixed, was its age, prosecutor Alan Jackson said. "Very few" other people benefited from the glitch because most people in Billericay were not overdrawn.

The couple used some of the money to buy luxury clothes, stay at hotels and put a deposit on a sports car.

When police raided the couple's home they found over £27,000 in envelopes marked "holiday money", "car money", "clothes money", "kitchen money" and "baby money".

The pair admitted the theft and have been handed nine month suspended sentences, put on probation for two years and ordered to complete 250 hours of unpaid work. Joanne Jones lost her job after pleading guilty.

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Comments: (2)

A Finextra member 

Looking at the difference between what the pair are supposed to have taken and what the police found on the premises (£61,400-£27,000 = £34,400), if each of them has to do 250 hours of community work that equates to a wage of £68 pounds per hour. Not bad if that's a "punishment"!

A Finextra member 

So ... ATMs suffer from bit-rot (the machine equivalent of dementia) as they get old then do they?

Now, where can I get a card?

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