OUTER SPACE–While a recent guilty plea didn’t directly involve credit unions, it does raise the prospect of yet another risk CU leaders must monitor—fraud from outer space.
Summer Worden, 50, a former Air Force intelligence officer, pleaded guilty to lying to a federal agent by falsely claiming that her estranged astronaut wife illegally accessed her bank account while aboard the Station for six months, prosecutors in Houston said.
The guilty plea comes more than five years after she was indicted in the space case for lying about actions by her wife, Anne McClain, a U.S. Army colonel, while they were in the midst of a divorce.
Worden’s trial in the case was scheduled to begin this week in Houston federal court.
The Kansas resident was accused of making false statements about McClain to NASA‘s Office of Inspector General and the Federal Trade Commission.
‘Illegal Access’
Worden in July “alleged her estranged spouse had guessed the password and illegally accessed her bank account while the spouse was deployed to the International Space Station,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas said in a statement.
“However, Worden had actually opened the account in April 2018,” the statement continued. “Both parties had accessed it until January 2019 when Worden changed the credentials.”
“The investigation revealed Worden had granted her spouse access to her bank records from at least 2015, including her login credentials,” the statement said.
McClain’s attorney told The New York Times in 2019 that she had checked the account to monitor the family’s finances, and that she had never been told by Worden that she could not have access to the account.
