Prosecutor: Claims of an international lottery win were a hoax

Larry Neumeister

Wednesday, March 8, 2000 | 9:22 a.m.

NEW YORK - A woman who sued a bank for not allowing her access to $700,000 that had accidentally been deposited in her account has been charged with bank fraud and other crimes that can carry stiff penalties.

Prosecutors said the charges resulted from Susan Rouse Madakor's reaction to a mistake Chase Manhattan Bank made when it began depositing large amounts of money into the 40-year-old Brooklyn woman's account.

Besides bank fraud, Madakor was charged with making false statements to a bank and bank larceny after she submitted a false affidavit, the office of U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White announced Tuesday.

Madakor, who quickly spent a substantial part of the windfall, had fought to keep the money, saying she thought she had won a lottery.

In an affidavit filed in state court, she said she quit her job last April at a textile company in Manhattan, where she was paid $23,500 annually and restructured her life "based upon my new found wealth."

Richard D. Willstatter, her lawyer, declined to comment Tuesday but said a statement would be made another day.

The money, prosecutors alleged, had been accidentally deposited in Madakor's account because her account number was a single digit off from one belonging to the United Nations Environmental Program. Both accounts were with Chase.

The deposits were made between February 1998 and last October by the governments of France, Italy, Belgium, Turkey, Namibia, Uruguay, St. Kitts and Dominica, according to court papers.

Shortly after Chase discovered the error last fall, it froze about $450,000 remaining in Madakor's accounts. The rest, prosecutors said, had been either withdrawn by Madakor or moved to other accounts.

In December, Madakor filed a lawsuit in state Supreme Court in Manhattan to force the bank to free the money.

In legal papers, she said she had bought $100 worth of "International Lottery" tickets in 1997 using her credit card, believed the U.N. money rightfully belonged to her and that the bank had waited too long to claim otherwise.

She said she had used some of the money to open a Laundromat.

In her affidavit, Madakor said she was "very excited to receive the money."

"At the time, I thought I had won the International Lottery, which I had entered earlier," she said. "No one every questioned these transfers at all. The transfers came from foreign governments, and I thought these were structured payments, much like one would get from the New York state government had I won the lottery here."

But a criminal complaint filed by federal prosecutors said the statement about the international lottery was false, made only so that Madakor could keep the money.

The complaint said records of several credit card accounts held by Madakor in 1997 do not reveal any charges for lottery ticket purchases.

It also accuses Madakor of telling others that she earned the money modeling, or had come into an inheritance.

If convicted, she faces a maximum penalty of 30 years in prison and a fine of $1 million; or twice the gain she derived from the crime.