I see that there's something in the news about FLOK cameras or something like that. I don't really pay much attention to the news these days and I haven't seen any of that nonsense in my area. But for whatever reason the notion that everything we do being recorded all the time reminded me of times when getting away with something be it criminal or otherwise, was a lot "easier" back when I was a youth.
That doesn't mean that I was trying to get up to no good, I was actually a pretty good kid that turned into a pretty good adult... or at least that is how I like to explain having never been to prison and only ever being arrested once in my life.
There was a roommate I had in college though, that was nearly the victim of financial crimes but the person who tried to perpetrate it on her was such an idiot that he didn't get very far and it was only due to his own seriously ignorant ways that he was easily and quite slowly, busted.
So the story goes that my roomate in this relative commune that I lived in at one point - which is another story in itself - is that one of my female roomates discovered around time that we were all getting our checkbooks out to pay the rent that she couldn't find her checkbook. in the mid 90's this wasn't something that we really paid a great deal of attention to, we weren't writing checks often.
Well she looked everywhere and it simply wasn't there. When she contacted her bank they already knew that her checkbook was missing and had cancelled the book in question. She needed to come in to get her new checkbook free of charge.
She thought it was strange that they would know that her checkbook was already missing when she didn't even know but as it turns out, someone had lifted it from her purse at some point in time in the past month. There weren't CCTV's all over the place back then so nobody really knows how or when it happened.
But the guy who did it ended up getting caught pretty easily when he walked into her bank with a check made out to HIS OWN NAME and when the teller asked him for ID he provided it. She seemed a little bit suspicious because his signature that he had to sign in order to get the small amount of money out of the account looked an awful lot like the handwriting on the check The total attempted withdrawal was something small, something like $100.
I guess bank tellers are trained in this sort of handwriting recognition but I would be lying if the guy didn't get profiled a little bit. He was disheveled and kind of dirty looking and acted nervous at the counter.
So as the story was told to me the teller has a button she can hit for precisely this sort of suspected fraud situation and she took her sweet ol' time in getting everything together, she photocopied his ID and informed him that it was just standard procedure, which it wasn't at the time.
The police were notified and they have a sort of courteous way of handling this so that it doesn't interfere with the operation of the bank or potentially create a violent situation either. The police were already there when he exited the bank with his money in hand.
They apparently followed him for a while and he didn't even put up a fight when they caught up with him and arrested him. I don't think you do much time or maybe not even any time for fraudulently cashing $100 forged check, but he was caught immediately. He had the checkbook on him at the time of his arrest as well.
There are a lot of different ways that this guy could have maybe gotten away with this such as going to one of those dodgy check cashing places that charge a huge fee because what does he care? It's not his money. But instead he decided to go to the actual branch bank on the checks, provide his real ID, and upon closer inspection it turns out that he signed her check in the place where the check owner is meant to sign, with his own signature of his own name.
I don't know what happened to that guy but when his picture got circulated people started talking about how he was always up to some sort of scammy something or other. He was a regular at the local illegal gambling pool hall. I can only guess that he was looking for more pool gambling money and this was his shot, or so he thought.
I think financial fraud at this level is probably significantly more difficult to get away with these days. Half of the time when i am trying to use my own cards I can't do so without going through some long process of verifying that it is me. Looking back it is just crazy to me that we used to hand over a piece of paper that nobody could really verify and it would just be taken at your word that you actually have the money that was written there. And this was if you were using your own checkbook.
I hope the guy managed to turn his life around to do something he is good at, because he was not very good at crime!
