Accounting Alum and FBI Agent Jennifer Ngo, ’01, Fights for Justice
Jennifer Ngo, '01
Wielding weapons on secret missions isn’t the only way federal agents can protect and serve. Jennifer Ngo, ’01, is just as dangerous with data, records, her mind, and intuition.
Ngo, a La Salle Honors Program graduate, is on an FBI Philadelphia team of 14 agents and four analysts intent on protecting financially vulnerable Americans and convicting those who steal from them. Her work leads to the arrest and conviction of whitecollar criminals engaging in identity theft as well as mortgage, security, bank, and wire fraud.
A one-year investigation by Ngo’s team led to the 2009 indictment of two attorneys and a trio of mortgage brokers who carried out an equity skimming scheme.
These five eventual convicts from the Doylestown area enticed people who were struggling to pay mortgages to yield control to investors, Ngo explained. So-called investors would then secretly retain homeowners’ titles and strip them of their equity.
Two of the attorneys and one mortgage broker pleaded guilty. The other two mortgage brokers, a husband and wife, were convicted in a June trial.
“The biggest thing by far right now is mortgage fraud,” Ngo said. “It’s where we get our most indictments.”
Ngo was inspired to work for the FBI when a female agent shared her public corruption-fighting career with Ngo’s seventh-grade class. This agent advised an accounting degree was a best way in.
“I knew La Salle had a great accounting program,” said Ngo, an Ambler, Pa., native. “I was recruited for basketball and the best thing I learned was how to balance sports and studying.”
Ngo, a self-proclaimed math-minded person, recalled her first La Salle challenge was her freshman year Honors Program Triple—literature, philosophy, and world history courses grouped together over two semesters.
“I always lived with other basketball players and was always busy academically,” she said. “One of my biggest memories was when we beat St. Joe’s to win the Big 5.”
Ngo was a 5-foot, 6-inch point guard and three-year captain for La Salle’s women’s basketball team, which during her freshman year boasted the highest GPA in the country with a few Honors students on board. The squad had around a .500 winning percentage in Ngo’s four years, while Ngo won multiple Atlantic 10 honors for academics and her offensive excellence.
In 2007, she was inducted to the Big 5 Hall of Fame, and last year she was inducted into La Salle’s Hall of Athletes. She still regularly attends La Salle basketball games.
Jennifer was also profiled in a recent edition of the Beta Gamma Sigma newsletter.