PITTSBURGH (Legal Newsline) - A former BNY Mellon employee was sentenced in federal court on Wednesday to 33 months in prison and ordered to pay restitution of $450,037.06, announced the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania.

Danielle M. Keane, 38, was also sentenced to five years supervised release on her conviction of embezzlement. She was an employee of BNY Mellon Bank in charge of administering a pension fund for McDermott, Inc.

For three years, between April 30, 2007 and Aug. 1, 2010, she utilized her position as a data entry associate and trust operations coordinator to create unauthorized checks drawn on the accounts of pensioners.

She would then use her knowledge of internal routing procedure to divert checks to herself so that they would not be mailed to the pensioners nor would the pensioners know that they were issued. Keane would then endorse and deposit the checks into her bank account. She would also wire money in the form of direct deposit from these pension accounts directly into her bank account. This way the depositing bank would not question her on the reason why the checks she was depositing were not in her name.

For an additional concealment measure, Keane entered an "adjustment" into the pensioner's account ledger, making it look like the money that was drawn by the unauthorized check was re-credited back into the pension account, and the pensioner would be led to believe that there was more money in the account than there actually was.

These actions would cover up the payments from tax reporting documents of the pensioners, so that the pensioners would not be alerted at the end of the year (when they received their tax forms) of the excess amount taken from their accounts, which Kean was stealing. A forensic accounting has discovered that Keane fraudulently issued approximately 168 checks and 71 wire transfers totaling approximately $452,037.06 of money that was entrusted to the care and custody of BNY Mellon.