Check-washing scheme foiled by alert bank tellers

ALBANY — Businesswoman B.J. Fletcher is thankful today that some sharp-eyed bank tellers paid attention to the signature on a check purportedly written to one of her employees.

Had they not, she might be $17,500 poorer.

In a saga that stretched from Albany to Tifton and back, a person who identified herself as “Jallah Smith” got her hands on an $18.96 check Fletcher had written for one of her employees, “washed” it — but not very well … more on that later — and tried to cash it at banks in Albany and Tifton. When the Tifton bank refused to use the phony check to open an account, “Smith” raised such a commotion she was arrested.

When Fletcher, in a roundabout way, discovered that the check had been presented for collection — and refused — at banks in Albany and Tifton, she made a trip to Tifton and filed a complaint that could possibly extend “Smith’s” stay at the jail there a bit longer.

“I got a call that my ID said was from an Ameris Bank here in Albany, but I’ve gotten so many phony calls lately — and I didn’t know of any business I had pending with them — so I ignored it at first,” Fletcher, owner of BJ’s Buffet, said. “The next day I got a call from an Ameris Bank branch in Tifton, so I answered the call. I was told someone had come to the bank trying to cash a $17,500 check on one of my business accounts.

“I had done business at that bank before, and the teller who was presented the check said the signature didn’t match the one they had on file. She said they’d kept the check. So I thought, ‘End of story.'”

Turns out it wasn’t. When Fletcher received a fraud alert on her phone from Truist Bank, she decided to dig a little deeper. She was informed that a check in the amount of $17,500 had been presented at the two banks, and she was asked to initiate a fraud report.

“It turns out the real check, written on Jan. 24, was an $18.96 check I’d written for one of my employees,” Fletcher said. “I asked him where he’d mailed it, and he said he’d put it in the mailbox by the (Albany) Dairy Queen. 

“I followed up with the local Ameris Bank, and it turns out the check had been refused there. But they said the Tifton branch also had refused to take the check. I had had an account there about 15 years ago, but the teller knew enough to check for my signature they had on record. I guess that shows you how God works in mysterious ways.”

The “Smith” person who’d tried to use the check to open an account in Tifton was charged with disorderly conduct when she raised a ruckus about the bank refusing her request. Unfortunately for her, and, an Albany Police Department detective told Fletcher, likely the gang she’s working with, when the check was washed, Fletcher’s signature was washed out as well. When “Smith” tried to replicate what she thought Fletcher’s signature might look like, she merely made a couple of loops and an extended line from the loops.

“They did an amazing job of washing the check,” Fletcher said. “But unfortunately for them — lucky for me — they washed out my signature in the process. She had no idea what that might look like, so she tried to fake it.

“I went to Tifton and thanked everyone at that branch of the bank. I told them, ‘You don’t know how many people I’d have had to struggle to make my payroll for this week if you hadn’t stopped that check.'”

Fletcher’s dilemma is just one of many in a rash of check-washing reports issued among businesses and individuals in the community. Attorneys Michael Hall and Lauren Williamson of the Albany-based Hall & Williamson PC law firm gave an account of how checks they had mailed had been washed over a three-day holiday weekend, leaving them no doubt that the checks were taken from the post office branch on Meredyth Drive.

“We got the checks we were mailing to the post office just as they were closing on a Friday,” Williamson said. “On Tuesday, those checks were presented at local banks to be cashed. Since Monday was a postal holiday, there’s no way in the world the checks would have made it to anyone on a Tuesday. We have no doubt that the checks were stolen in the post office branch.”

Despite evidence that clearly points to theft within the post office, Williamson said nothing has been done, even when the person who tried to cash the checks used a name that was easily traced.

“This person was dumb enough to put their actual name on the checks,” she said. “I went online and found them easily. I guess they’re pretty confident nothing will be done to them.”

Despite the rash of such crimes that a number of citizens and business owners have complained about, so far the arrest in Tifton is the only one tied to the local crimes that have been reported.

File Photo: Carlton Fletcher