Germantown Woman Stole Over $1M from Employer

Sobeida Maria Laboy, 46, of Germantown, Maryland, admitted to stealing more than $1 million from the financial institution where she worked — a brazen, years-long bank fraud scheme that unraveled after nearly seven years of deception. Laboy pleaded guilty on November 30, 2016, to one count of bank fraud, confessing to submitting fake invoices and intercepting company checks meant for vendors.

According to her plea agreement, Laboy worked at the Chevy Chase branch of a financial institution offering online banking and affiliated mortgage services. From December 2007 through June 19, 2014, she fabricated invoices that appeared to come from a legitimate vendor. She submitted those invoices with check requests, directing payments to be sent to her office. Then came the forgery: Laboy forged another employee’s signature in the approval section to clear the payments.

Instead of forwarding the checks to the vendor, Laboy deposited at least 60 of them — all issued by her employer and made payable to the fake vendor — directly into her personal bank accounts. She also laundered at least six additional checks, either issued by her employer to other vendors or by vendors to her employer, funneling the money into her own pockets. The total haul: $1,020,576.28.

U.S. Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein and FBI Special Agent in Charge Gordon B. Johnson announced the guilty plea, underscoring the severity of a crime that exploited internal trust and weak oversight. Laboy’s position gave her access, and she used it with cold precision — exploiting procedures, bypassing approvals, and erasing accountability one forged signature at a time.

She now faces a maximum penalty of 30 years in federal prison. U.S. District Judge Peter J. Messitte set her sentencing for March 15, 2017, at 9:30 a.m. No plea deal could erase the scale of the theft or the betrayal of her employer’s trust.

The case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Lindsay Eyler Kaplan and Nicolas A. Mitchell and is part of the President’s Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force — a sweeping federal effort to combat economic crime. Since 2009, the Justice Department has filed over 18,000 financial fraud cases. Laboy’s name now joins that growing list — not as a victim, but as a thief who thought she could get away with stealing over a million dollars, one fake invoice at a time.