The former vice president of Appalachian Community Bank in Ellijay, Ga., has been found guilty of a fraud that helped force the bank to close in March 2010.
A federal jury convicted William R. "Rusty" Beamon of five counts of bank fraud, according to a news release from the U.S. attorney's office in Atlanta.
He was the second Appalachian Community Bank officer convicted of defrauding Appalachian Community Bank. In April 2013, former senior vice president Adam Teague was sentenced to nearly six years in federal prison for conspiracy to commit fraud.
According to Friday's release, Beamon was in charge of Appalachian's foreclosure liquidation department.
In 2009, he told a real estate agent that he owned a house in Cumming, Ga. He hired the agent to market and lease the property on his behalf. In fact, the bank owned the property, which was in foreclosure, the release stated.
The agent found someone who leased the property and Beamon pocketed more than $20,000 in rent payments and security deposits.
Beamon also caused Appalachian to sell bank-owned properties to his wife and to a shell company that he owned--all at prices that were substantially below what other buyers were willing and able to pay, the release stated.
"Bank fraud comes in many forms but when it comes in the form of the bank's own vice president, it becomes all the more intolerable," said J. Britt Johnson, special agent in charge of the FBI's Atlanta Field Office.
"Mr. Beamon, as a banking executive, should have protected his bank and its assets from fraud but instead he saw an opportunity to enrich his own bank account. The federal sentencing handed down to Mr. Beamon will be not only the closing note to one man's banking career but also to the bank that he caused to fail."
U.U. Attorney Sally Quillian Yates said Georgia led the nation in bank failures since 2008, with 88 banks failing, including Appalachian Community Bank.
"These failures have significantly affected the economy, making these cases important to safeguard the nation's financial health," Yates said in the release.
Sentencing has not yet been scheduled.
In the Teague case, he engaged in an "extend and pretend' scheme using the proceeds of new bank loans to hide past-due loans, federal prosecutors said. Teague also hid the bank's growing inventory of foreclosed property by directing the bank to finance sales of the properties to buyers including two shell companies he controlled -- GPH ("God Please Help") Investments and PHL ("Please Help Lord") Investments.
Teague guilty Aug. 22, 2012. U.S. District Judge Richard W. Story sentenced him to five years, 10 months in prison and five years of probation. Teague was also ordered to forfeit $5.8 million that the government said he received from the transactions, plus, all of the real property that he purchased with the proceeds of the conspiracy.
"This bank was robbed from the inside, not by a bandit carrying a gun, but a bank officer carrying a pen," Yates said at Teague's sentencing.
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