A man drove around different neighborhoods searching for mailboxes with raised flags. Then, he’d steal the homeowners’ outgoing mail, federal prosecutors said.
If he found a check while rifling through their mail, he’d steal it, wash it out, put himself down as the payee and bring it to a local bank to claim the cash, according to prosecutors.
What’s more is that he’d increase the check’s value by writing in a new payment amount — allowing him to steal more than $35,000 from banks along the Florida Panhandle, officials said.
The man, 43, of Defuniak Springs, took more than 30 checks from neighborhoods in the Fort Walton Beach area between March 2019 and July 2019, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Florida. Most victims were older individuals, prosecutors said.
Nearly four years later, a judge sentenced him to 45 months in federal prison after he pleaded guilty to mail theft, bank fraud and aggravated identity theft, the attorney’s office announced in a May 23 news release.
McClatchy News contacted the man’s attorney for comment on May 23 and didn’t immediately receive a response.
“Frauds, such as this one, which target the elderly and compromise essential institutions, such as the mail and our banking system, are serious federal offenses and violators will be prosecuted,” U.S. Attorney Jason R. Coody said in a statement.
The man’s sentencing comes after he was released from prison in Alabama in 2022, according to prosecutors.
He’s accused of carrying out a “similar” stolen checks scheme in the neighboring state and was sentenced to prison in 2019, officials said.
When he washed the checks written out to other individuals from Fort Walton Beach-area homeowners, he’d put down his name, or one of his fake names, in the payee section, prosecutors said.
He cashed the altered checks at Regions Bank, Bank of America, BB&T, Synovus Bank and other financial institutions., according to an indictment.
As part of his sentencing, the judge also ordered the man to pay $6,727 in restitution, prosecutors said.
The Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office and the United States Postal Inspection Service investigated the case, according to the release.
Fort Walton Beach is about 165 miles west of Tallahassee.
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