Five charged with defrauding special needs school

How does this happen?

It always amazes me how people get away with things like this, but then I remember my first full time job. I worked as a teller at the Bank of Montreal Marine Building in 1972/73. The women who managed us and met customers at the side counter would walk over and give me pre-approved instructions to close inactive accounts. If someone came to the wickets, we were instructed to send them to her to be vetted. I still remember the inactive account cards in their special tray. She would pull the card, go back to the person to get their ID, then ask a teller to cash out the account. This would happen often enough that I still remember the process. I had no idea she was a fraudster.

Many years later, I read what she was accused of and eventually charged with and how much. I now know how exactly how she did it. She was intimidating. I was scared of her. She was grumpy and older, she had experience. Since I didn't know much about how things worked, what she said was law. If she told me to jump, it wasn't a case of jumping, I'd ask exactly how high. I was 18, living on my own, and this job meant basic food, shelter and clothing and quite a bit of fun. Keeping her happy was important because she could make my life miserable. Living in the west end, foreign ships docked at the foot of Burrard, and sailors from all over the world exchanging their money, branch staff parties every week where alcohol flowed freely...it was a great job. I saved $100 a month, enough to travel across Canada for four months after working there for ten months.

But those visitors at the side counter, they may not have been customers whose accounts were inactive, they may have been her friends, cohorts or they could have been legitimate customers who had no idea what she was doing when she asked them to wait. She would take the cash from me, rather than have the person stand in line, and of course I trusted her to take their ID and vet they were entitled, and of course, I'd have a lineup, so I'd never have time to watch her give the money to that person at the counter, or she'd stop along the way, and I wouldn't track her all the way to the person at the side counter who was supposedly the inactive account she was to hand the money over to.