Bank employee gets 15 months for theft

The former ATM custodian of First Hawaiian Bank’s Kapaa branch is going to federal prison for 15 months for stealing more than $140,000 from the bank’s automated teller machine over a five-year period.

U.S. District Judge Leslie E. Koba­ya­shi handed down the sentence Monday. She gave Shelli Ornellas until after the holidays to turn herself in to begin serving the sentence. Koba­ya­shi also ordered Ornellas to repay First Hawaiian Bank $140,329.

Ornellas, 36, pleaded guilty to embezzlement by a bank employee for stealing the money from 2008 to this past February.

Prosecutor Andrea Hattan said Ornellas took money from the ATM on hundreds of occasions until bank officials discovered the theft when the machine ran out of money. She said Ornellas concealed her theft by manually altering the ATM’s balance to reflect an amount higher than the amount of cash that was actually in the machine.

Her scheme involved putting empty envelopes into the ATM for deposit into her own account, then filling the envelopes with cash from the machine.

Ornellas told court officials that she let the ATM run out of money so she would be caught because she could no longer deal with the stress of hiding what she did from others.

Her lawyer Salina Alt­hof said after Ornellas admitted her guilt, she talked with bank officials to detail procedural weaknesses that allowed her to commit the theft. That resulted in the bank firing Ornellas’ supervisor.