By Lucas Daprile, cleveland.com
CLEVELAND, Ohio — When Yue Cao joined KeyBank as a quant analytics manager, his job was straightforward: Protect customers from fraudsters looking to siphon off their savings.
Instead, prosecutors say Cao hatched a scheme targeting elderly victims who had no clue their accounts were being drained by a man who was hired to safeguard their money.
All told, prosecutors say Cao made off with $2 million by creating bogus online accounts in the names of these customers and transferring their funds into his own account. This week, he confronted the possible price: decades in prison.
On Feb. 6, a federal jury convicted Cao on 10 counts of bank fraud, four counts of aggravated identity theft and one count of money laundering after he was accused of defrauding 100 clients.
The victims, aged between 90 to 103 years old, lived in Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Washington.
The accusations in this case mirror a much larger trend. Each year, millions of elderly people become prey for scammers who often engage in some form of financial fraud. And the threat is rising as the elderly population expands, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
While it’s common for grifters to target elderly victims, it’s unusual for the victims to be as old as they were in this case, FBI Supervisory Special Agent Pat Koeth told cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer.
“Typically, when we talk elder fraud, we’re talking about the 60 and older population,” Koeth said. “This one does stand out to us.”
Cao, a Chinese citizen and Illinois resident represented by Chicago attorneys Vadim Glozman and Joseph Strauss, maintained his innocence.
Glozman said his client is “disappointed in the jury’s verdict” and plans to appeal the ruling. He also noted Cao was not fired from KeyBank, but left voluntarily before charges were filed.
Judge Philip Calabrese, who oversaw the trial, has yet to schedule the sentencing. Prosecutors say Cao’s sentence could range from two to 30 years.
This case was unusual for more reasons than just the victims’ ages, Koeth said. Typically, when scammers target elderly people, they are simply pretending to be a bank official.
“We see more of people impersonating the bank,” Koeth said. “We see a lot less of actual, honest-to-God banking officials…embezzling money from clients.”
One way elderly people may ward off this crime is by setting up banking alerts to notify them if a substantial amount of money is transferred out of their account, Koeth said.
Reporting is key. Those who believe they have been the victim of an internet-based crime can file a complaint with the Bureau’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, ic3.gov, which fields hundreds of thousands of reports per year. According to the center’s 2024 report – the most recent available – more than 1,600 Ohioans reported identity theft that year. In total, 135 of them were elderly.
Across the country, more than 147,000 people reported elder fraud to the IC3 in 2024, and nearly $4.9 billion in losses.
Koeth credited KeyBank’s internal investigators for discovering the fraud and referring the case to the FBI.
“Their own investigators were the ones who found these anomalies in their aging KeyBank population and being like, ‘Hey, this is outside of the ordinary.’”
Spokespeople for KeyBank did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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