LOS ANGELES
Federal officials stated that the former chief financial officer at a bank in the Chinatown area of downtown Los Angeles was sentenced Friday to three years in federal prison for embezzling more than $700,000 of his employer’s funds.
U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong sentenced Sammy Sims, 61, of West Covina. The judge also ordered Sims to pay $306,849 in restitution.
Sims pleaded guilty on Feb. 22 to one count of bank fraud. He also admitted to stealing bank employees’ identities to open life insurance policies in their names to benefit his wife.
Chinatown-based Eastern International Bank hired Sims in September 2017 as the lender’s CFO.
As a condition of his employment, Sims agreed that he would not use the bank’s confidential information for his benefit or for others, officials stated.
The bank’s policy also required Sims to promptly disclose any conflicts or appearances of conflict with the bank’s interests.
Sims’s scheme to defraud his employer lasted from February 2018 until at least April 2021.
From August 2018 to October 2020, Sims wired $86,000 in bank funds to the United States Treasury and California Franchise Tax Board to make payments towards personal federal and state income taxes for himself and his wife.
Sims concealed these transactions by creating false entries in the bank’s general ledger that falsely represented that the payments were for the bank’s tax accounts.
In April 2019, Sims used about $14,161 in bank funds to a debt collection agency to help pay off a debt that he had incurred.
Sims concealed this transaction by creating a false entry in the bank’s general ledger that falsely stated the payment was for data processing software.
From April 2019 to December 2020, Sims took approximately $113,264 in money belonging to the bank to pay the balances on his credit card.
Sims hid these expenses in the bank’s general ledger by falsely labeling them as bank expenses.
During this time, he also siphoned approximately $81,815 from the bank by using a bank credit card meant for work purposes for his expenses, including steak dinners and a trip to Las Vegas.
Sims lied to several bank employees from February 2020 to April 2021 by telling them they had to switch their bank-funded life insurance policies because of their age.
What neither the employees nor the bank knew was that these policies were obtained through Sims’s wife, a licensed life insurance broker who received a commission for each life policy she sold.
Sims obtained some employees’ personal identifying information without their consent 
and then used it to purchase his wife’s life insurance policies.
Sims used a bank checking account to wire approximately $311,608 of the bank’s money to several life insurance companies to partially pay for the premiums for these policies.
Later, when Sims was confronted about the life insurance policies opened using bank employees’ personal identifying information, he lied by saying the employees’ identities could have been stolen through a cybersecurity hack or by unauthorized disclosures by the bank’s personnel department.
Sims resigned from the bank shortly after being confronted about the life insurance policies.
In total, Sims unlawfully took $737,849 of bank funds for his personal use and benefit.
The FBI and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Office of Inspector General investigated this matter.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Jason C. Pang of the General Crimes Section prosecuted this case.