A Virginia federal inmate was indicted late Tuesday on charges of running an elaborate scheme from his prison cell designed to swindle cash from Swiss bank accounts that was intended for the families of Holocaust victims, federal prosecutors in Alexandria said.
John Kenneth Leighnor Jr., 49, faces 76 years in prison and a $2.75 million fine for stealing, or attempting to steal, the identities of Holocaust victims and their families in an effort to obtain funds from dormant Swiss bank accounts left behind by victims of the Holocaust, according to the U.S. attorney for Virginia’s Eastern District.
Leighnor would identify his intended victims by reviewing obituaries and dormant Swiss bank account lists, which detailed “names of owners and power of attorney holders of Swiss Bank accounts that were open or opened between 1933 and 1945 and whose owners were probably or possibly victims of Nazi persecution,” according to court documents.
Lists of unclaimed Swiss bank accounts can easily be accessed on the Internet, where Web sites like avotaynu.com boast a searchable database of 50,000 Holocaust-era Jewish names. Bankers estimate that the long-dormant accounts hold as much as $1.25 billion.
Using the identifying information, Leighnor would claim in letters to various government agencies that he was either the Holocaust victim or a lawyer representing the victim, prosecutors say. In those letters, he would request the victim’s personal documents — birth certificates, family information, undergraduate transcripts and death certificates — be sent to Dept. 14375-077, P.O. Box 1000, Petersburg, VA, while concealing that “14375-077” was his prisoner identification number, prosecutors said.
Once the personal information was in hand, prosecutors said, Leighnor planned to use it to gather family genealogy information from the German government that’s used in identifying the descendants of Holocaust victims and in turn use that to file claims with the Claims Resolution Tribunal — an organization that handles claims on Swiss bank accounts believed to be abandoned by Holocaust victims.
Prosecutors also believe Leighnor planned to use the identifying information to obtain passports, birth certificates, driver’s licenses and European Union Identification Cards in the victims’ names so he could travel and obtain cash and credit from unnamed financial institutions and individuals.
The FBI and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service worked together to bring the charges against Leighnor.
