A Webster Bank employee in Kent is accused of stealing money from several elderly customers’ accounts and has been arrested.
Police said he is suspected of stealing more than $100,000 in total from five customers and told investigators that he felt badly about taking the money and intended to replace it.
The investigation started when a Webster Bank employee contacted the Kent resident trooper on the morning of June 5 to report the theft of funds from the Webster Bank on North Main Street in Kent.
The next morning, the resident trooper met with a bank representative who said that a bank employee, Arron Parsons, 44, of Kent, was being investigated for larceny of funds from elderly banking clients, according to state police.
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The bank had found increased cash withdrawals from the savings account of an elderly client of the Kent branch location and the banking center manager saw that the handwriting on the tickets resembled Parson’s handwriting and not the client’s handwriting, according to a news release from state police.
State police said the manager then went through the security video of the transactions and determined that the elderly banking client wasn’t at the bank when the withdrawals were made. They said banking transactions Parsons made were identified by his employee identification number.
Bank representatives told state police that Parsons admitted to bank investigators that he’d made unauthorized cash withdrawals and identified the clients whose accounts he had withdrawn funds from, state police said.
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Parsons had said that once he withdrew funds, he deposited them into his own bank account for personal use, state police said.
He also said he felt badly about taking the funds and intended to replace them and had replaced some of the funds taken from one client on one occasion, according to state police.
Parsons is suspected of making 39 unauthorized withdrawals from five accounts belonging to five different clients, for a total of more than $100,000, between Feb. 22, 2022, and Feb. 21, 2023.
State police said the clients who were affected were reimbursed for the unauthorized withdrawals.
Parsons was taken into custody on Friday and charged with larceny in the first degree.
He was released from custody and he is due in court on Feb. 27.
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