Kam Wong, 63, the former CEO of Municipal Credit Union of New York, was sentenced Tuesday to more than five years in prison for embezzlement and fraud.
Wong received a sentence of 66 months in prison for a plethora of financial crimes, including embezzling millions from the credit union during his time as CEO, according to a press release Tuesday from Geoffrey S. Berman, United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York.
Wong was also sentenced to three years of supervised release, and ordered to forfeit nearly $9.9 million (the amount he is estimated to have defrauded the credit union out of) and pay restitution in that amount to MCU.
Berman stated that during Wong’s tenure as CEO he engaged in a “long-running multi-faceted scheme to obtain money” from the credit union and also “took steps to seek to conceal” his actions. Among other things, Wong defrauded MCU by presenting phony invoices for dental work he never had done, thereby receiving reimbursement for hundreds of thousands of dollars of such nonexistent dental work.
Wong used his ill-gotten cash to purchase luxury items, including a Mercedes-Benz, electronic devices and visits to expensive hotels, among others. He also used cash to fund the educational, housing, and living expenses for two of his relatives.
Wong was arrested in May 2018 and subsequently terminated by the credit union in June 2018.
“For years, Kam Wong … betrayed the credit union’s hard-working members from the perch of his executive suite by siphoning off millions of dollars in company money for his personal benefit,” Berman said. “Wong then tried to cover up what he had done by making false statements to federal investigators and creating false and misleading documents. He will now serve a substantial prison sentence for his crime.”
Jeffrey Lichtman, Wong’s attorney, told Credit Union Journal Wednesday, “We’re disappointed in the length of the sentence even though it was a third less than the bottom of the advisory sentencing guidelines in this case.” He also claimed Wong’s “lifetime of good deeds” and “impossible success story” have been forever tarnished by his criminal actions.
The attorney said Wong’s gambling and drug addictions were the primary causes for his actions, sentiments the judge in the case agreed with. Lichtman further added his client hopes to “alert people to the dangers of such actions upon his release from prison.”
This story was updated at 12:42 P.M. on June 5, 2019.
