It was going to be the perfect computer crime, orchestrated with elaborate Internet planning: $16.8 million would be wired to Eastern Europe and the two thieves would vanish with new identities.
But in the end, it was a Baltimore bank teller and a security officer just doing their jobs that foiled a high-tech international money-laundering scheme.
"Something didn't look quite right," said Richard Parker, the security officer for NationsBank who helped identify a series of suspicious transactions in September 1996 that sparked an overseas "cyberbanking" investigation. "We said, 'Wait a minute, something's wrong here.' "
The extra minute they waited may have saved millions. In today's world of fast global communication and money wire transfers, 60 seconds would have been all that was needed for Scott Posnanski and Jonathan May to complete their plan.
Posnanski, a well-to-do computer programmer from Chicago, and May, an accountant from Oregon, had plotted to steal nearly $17 million from the automobile company they worked for and ship it to Estonia, then to Switzerland.
It was all to be done with the help of a former Soviet army officer-turned-capitalist they'd contacted through the Internet.
Experts say the World Wide Web, which offers a host of shadowy sites that claim it's possible to hide ill-gotten fortunes in obscure banks, is partly responsible for a surge in international money-laundering crimes.
"It's happening so often that it's impossible to keep up with," said Fletcher N. Baldwin Jr., a law professor at the University of Florida who's written a series of books on financial crime. "There's a lot more of it going on than the courts realize. People would be horrified if they knew the amount of money being lost to money launderers."
Interpol and the National Crime Index, a London-based think tank, estimate the total amount of money being laundered in the world today at between $300 billion and $1.3 trillion.
Federal agents say the Posnanski and May case is indicative of money-laundering attempts that they've been seeing more of: intelligent, well-educated people with no criminal records deciding to take a shot at shipping a stolen hoard overseas.
Posnanski, who was caught in the final stages of the scheme before any of the money made it to Estonia, was sentenced in U.S. District Court in Baltimore last week to 41 months in prison. But prosecutors are still trying to determine how much he should pay in restitution for a scheme that cost tens of thousands to investigate. Another hearing will take place in the next month.
"They're complicated cases because we find that the criminals are getting a lot more international access, such as through the Internet," said Thomas E. Boyle, a U.S. postal inspector who investigated the Posnanski and May case. "It makes it a lot harder for us to follow the paper trail."
The trail began in mid-1995, while Posnanski and May were working at Insurance Auto Auctions, a thriving nationwide company based in Schaumberg, Ill., that buys and sells wrecked and damaged vehicles.
Posnanski, 31, the prep-school son of a Wisconsin bank president who pleaded guilty to tax evasion in 1996, had a flair for working with computer financial systems. He had a management information degree from Marquette University, designed Web pages for his company and landed a job at IAA's Chicago headquarters as a computer analyst.
May, 34, came from a more working-class background, having served three years in the Marine Corps before graduating from the University of Nevada-Las Vegas in 1991. He built an impressive resume as an accountant, working in California, Oregon and Nevada, while beefing up his computer skills.
"They both had a lot of potential," says Boyle. "But what they also had in common was greed."
Posnanski didn't respond to a request to be interviewed for this article. May, who served a 37-month prison sentence, couldn't be reached. But court papers, former colleagues, postal inspectors, the FBI and Secret Service investigators paint a picture of how the men came up with the scheme and how they tried to pull it off.
The two met in April 1996 while installing a new computer system for IAA in several of its offices across the country.
It wasn't long before the two friends noticed something while they were working on the new system. The hardware was vulnerable -- if someone wanted to, they mused to themselves and other colleagues, it could print out checks for cars that didn't exist.
"Posnanski and May commented about how easy it would be under the new system to create 'ghost files,' " according to a court document written by Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew C. White. "They talked about not only the method of creating 'ghost cars' and checks, but also the need to establish bank accounts for the placement of stolen funds as well and the necessity of deleting the bogus data so as to remove all trace of the crime."
Key to the scheme was patience -- Posnanski and May planned the scheme for six months before they were ready to act. Among the first of the preparations undertaken by Posnanski was a study of banking procedures.
Posnanski didn't have any trouble finding plenty of sites on the Internet that purport to offer secure offshore banking havens.
The site Posnanski settled on in August 1996 was www.taxbomber.com, offering passports, credit cards, and "Instant Anonymous Offshore Bank Accounts" in Austria, Croatia, Zimbabwe, and, among others, Estonia. The site, now defunct, was run out of Germany by a man named Verlag Ralph Tegtmeier, authorities said.
For $2,000 billed to his Visa card, Posnanski bought a package from Tegtmeier that included a software program called "Microbanker," Estonian bank account papers, wire transfer software, and test computer keys to allow for the use of the software, investigators said.
While Posnanski and May planned in the United States, a man named Frank Tuuksam was planning in Estonia. Tuuksam, a former Soviet soldier who was working for Tegtmeier, opened a corporate bank account in the Estonian capital of Talinn in the name of Samson Securities.
Samson Securities, in essence, was the corporate name given to Posnanski. Tegtmeier had incorporated more than 100 corporations in Delaware several years ago and sold the ownership of the individual "shell corporations" to anyone who needed corporate identity for banking purposes, investigators said.
Tuuksam provided Posnanski with the corporate documents, meaning that with the "Microbanker" software, he had control over the Samson Securities bank account in Estonia -- and therefore, would have the power to move money from the account to anywhere in the world.
Posnanski and May also created a corporate account at NationsBank using the name of a phony company, TTS Inc. They would then deposit the checks they were planning to illegally print via computer into the account, court papers said.
With Posnanski's laptop computer, they also obtained false identification -- Posnanski in the name Scott Williams, May in the name Jack Murphy -- that would enable them to assume new identities, prosecutors said.
Finally, they were ready to act. On Aug. 25, 1996, a Sunday, May worked for seven hours to print 416 checks on IAA's computers for roughly $40,000 apiece, making them payable to TTS Inc.
With the checks in hand, May flew to Baltimore. On Sept. 5, he deposited 209 of them -- totaling more than $8.1 million -- into NationsBank night deposit boxes.
Then he flew to Miami, where he began preparations to open a corporate account at Bank Von Ernst in Zurich, Switzerland, which was where he and Posnanski expected to ultimately transfer the money from Estonia, prosecutors said.
The next morning, employees arrived at their respective NationsBank branches in Baltimore and began sorting through the night deposits. The IAA checks were there -- and they looked legitimate enough that more than $3.4 million of them had cleared into the TTS account, court papers said.
But one teller, Lauren Neason, 24, of Catonsville, noticed something strange. All the checks were dated the same day, and all to the same company. She alerted her supervisor, and eventually word got to Parker, the security officer. The bank called IAA to make sure the checks were authorized.
"They told me they had a large deposit in excess of $3 million," a company official, Alison Adams, testified in U.S. District Court in Baltimore. She told the bank the transaction was unauthorized.
Things moved quickly. The bank put a hold on the account. Posnanski and May, who were attempting to wire-transfer the money, were arrested. Tuuksam, still in Estonia, was brought in for questioning by the FBI attache in that country, with the cooperation of the Estonian police.
Federal agents say Neason helped foil what was a well-tailored plan.
"It was literally just a good instinct by a bank teller that put a halt to it," says White, the prosecutor.
Neason declined to be interviewed for this article. But her mother, Doris Neason, said she was proud of her daughter for what she had done.
"She was just doing her job, and that's what made the difference," Doris Neason said. "I wish the bank had given her a reward for it. She didn't get anything."
One of the last things federal agents did at Posnanski's home in Lake in the Hills, Ill., was photograph the house. On the refrigerator, there was a magazine article that Posnanski had placed there.
"Buy your own Caribbean Island," it read.
Pub Date: 3/31/99