Wednesday March 8 8:37 AM ET
Lottery Woman Charged With Fraud
By LARRY NEUMEISTER Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK (AP) - A woman who sued a bank for not allowing her access to thousands of dollars that had been accidentally deposited in her account has been charged with fraud and other crimes.
Susan Rouse Madakor, 40, had sued Chase Manhattan Bank to keep the $700,000, saying she thought she had won a lottery.
Prosecutors said the money was mistakenly deposited because Madakor's account number was a single digit off from one belonging to the United Nations Environmental Program.
Madakor also was charged with making false statements to a bank and bank larceny after she submitted a false affidavit, the office U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White said Tuesday.
Madakor's lawyer, Richard Willstatter, declined comment.
The deposits were made between February 1998 and October 1999 by the governments of France, Italy, Belgium, Turkey, Namibia, Uruguay, St. Kitts and Dominica, according to court papers.
Shortly after the error was discovered last fall, the bank froze about $450,000 remaining in Madakor's accounts. The rest, prosecutors said, had been either withdrawn or moved to other accounts.
In legal papers, Madakor said she had bought $100 worth of ``International Lottery' tickets in 1997 using her credit card and believed the U.N. money rightfully belonged to her. She also said the bank had waited too long to demand the money returned.
Madakor lied about the lottery, and her credit card records don't show any charges for lottery ticket purchases, prosecutors said.
If convicted, she could be sentenced to 30 years in prison and fined $1 million.
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