A Fife bank worker who embezzled almost £220,000 of customers’ cash to fund her luxury lifestyle was jailed for three years at Cupar Sheriff Court.
Julie Fraser, 52, of George Govan Road, Cupar, admitted embezzling £218,349.93 between May 1 2007 and October 31 2012 while working at Halifax Bank of Scotland on Carberry Road, Kirkcaldy.
The court previously heard that Fraser stole the money over a five-year period while working as a relationship manager at the bank in order to fund her expensive lifestyle, while also putting her daughter through university.
She was eventually rumbled after a monitoring system highlighted an “internal” transfer of £5,000 from a customer account to another.
Further investigations revealed Fraser had made a total of 26 transactions from customers, one of whom had £152,500 stolen from her account.
Depute fiscal Dev Kapadia told Cupar Sheriff Court that Fraser had admitted the offences as soon as she was confronted by fraud investigators.
Defence solicitor David Bell told the court: “This has impacted not just on herself but her family members and she accepts she has to be punished and that a custodial sentence is inevitable.”
Sentencing Fraser, Sheriff Charles Macnair told her: “People put their money into banks in the hope and expectation that their money will be safe from embezzlement.
“The vast majority of your colleagues live up to that expecation but you have failed to do that and there can be no alternative to a custodial sentence.”
Fraser’s sentence was backdated to February 27.