Alleged bank vault robber posed with cash on Instagram, Facebook

Somebody really needs to write a rap about yobs who show off piles of loot in their social media feeds.

The alleged crook du jour: Arlando M. Henderson, 29, of Charlotte, North Carolina, whom the FBI has arrested and charged with supposedly stealing more than $88,000 smackers from the vaults of his employer, Wells Fargo Bank.

If he’s innocent, Henderson is going to have to explain why his Instagram rap shows him holding an AK-47 and large stacks of cash… and how in the world he found the wherewithal to pick up that Mercedes-Benz in his Facebook posts.

On Friday, the US Attorney’s Office for the Western District of North Carolina said that the FBI arrested Henderson on 4 December in San Diego and charged him with stealing cash from Wells Fargo’s bank vaults, from deposits made by its customers, and with using some of that beautiful green spray-o-cash…

…for a down payment on the sweet Mercedes-Benz, and then lying to get a car loan to pay the balance. He allegedly convinced the loan company that he was good for the dough by showing them bogus bank statements.

The indictment (posted courtesy of The Register) alleges that Henderson stole cash from the bank vault at least 18 times during 2019. He allegedly made cash deposits at an ATM near his workplace on the many days that he allegedly stole money.

To cover up his tracks, Henderson also allegedly destroyed some documentation and cooked up false entries in the bank’s books and records – or got other people to do it for him.

He’s charged with two counts of financial institution fraud; 19 counts of theft, embezzlement and misapplication; and 12 counts of making false entries, which carry a maximum penalty of 30 years in prison and a $1,000,000 fine, per count. He’s also looking at a charge of transactional money laundering, which carries a penalty of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Maximum penalties are rarely handed out, however.

Blabbers gonna blab, blab, blab, blab, blab

Gangsters (or alleged gangsters) using social media to brag about their crimes (or their alleged crimes) is nothing new… just ask the 63 (alleged) gang members who got arraigned in New York after spoon-feeding police with allusions to their alleged crimes, served up in posts on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

Fortunately, they don’t seem to be smart enough to know that police use social media, in spite of examples such as Hannah Sabata, a US woman arrested in 2012 for robbing a bank after posting a YouTube video about robbing a bank.

Nor, for that matter, do they seem to read news accounts or even listen to the grapevine, which might have tipped them off that police monitor Facebook to get status updates on, for example, “break-in day” in Brooklyn.