Counterfeit check rings rampant, police say

DALTON — When Nathan Billups strolled into the Regions Bank in downtown Dalton, Ga., he looked like an average customer, police said.

But when he tried to cash a large check from a business in Douglasville, bank tellers became suspicious and called police, said Dalton Police Chief Jason Parker. They refused to cash the check and he walked out.

Billups, a homeless man from Atlanta, was stopped by a Dalton officer on Tuesday, but police later realized he wasn’t the source of the check, Parker said. He has been arrested and charged with first-degree forgery and giving a false name, police said.

An Atlanta-based operation that uses homeless people to pose as blue-collar workers who try to cash fake checks for about $3,000 to $4,000 each at local banks continues to frustrate Tennessee and Georgia police.

“Who knows how large this operation is?” Parker said. “The risk is extremely low and the return is extremely high if they are successful.”

The checks are stolen from local businesses’ mail boxes and duplicated with real bank routing numbers, making it more difficult to spot fake ones, police say.

The scam reached serious proportions in the area about a year ago, local law officials said, and about eight months ago the U.S. attorney’s office and the FBI got involved.

The FBI traces the counterfeit ring to Latino gang members in Atlanta and believes the money could be funding the MS-13 gang, said Special Agent Stephen Emmett, a spokesman in the FBI’s Atlanta office.

MS-13 originated in Los Angeles in the 1980s and now is an international operation, considered by law enforcement officials to be one of the most violent and deadly gangs.

Nationally, the scam costs banks about $8 million a year, Emmett said.

Local police say the leaders of the ring recruit people at homeless shelters and soup kitchens in Atlanta, then drive to cities along Interstate 75 into Tennessee and back south into Georgia, attempting to cash the checks.

“(They’ll) pick up several people and put them in a hotel overnight,” said Calhoun Police spokesman Lt. Tony Pyle.

During the scam, the ringleaders will park across the street from the bank, Pyle said. When the homeless person comes out of the bank, “his job is to walk down the street, and they’ll pick him up.”

If police are called to the scene, the homeless person is on his own, Pyle said, left behind to face arrest and charges but leaving little to connect them with the real instigators.

“We’ve made several arrests, but we can never seem to get to the people in charge,” said Fort Oglethorpe Police Chief David Eubanks. “It’s very frustrating for us.”

But local banks are aware of the operation and have started checking with businesses when tellers are asked to cash checks worth more than a couple of hundred dollars, Parker said.

“Banks are a lot more vigilant,” he said. “They’ve finally learned to spot the pattern.”

Only about 50 miles from Atlanta, Calhoun is the perfect breeding ground for the operation, Pyle said. His department opens about seven or eight such cases per month and makes about five arrests each month on them, he said.

While North Georgia cities, including Dalton and Calhoun, are targeted, Chattanooga is not immune from the scams, said Donna Job, resident agent in charge of the U.S. Secret Service in Chattanooga.

“They come in pieces, normally three or four at a time,” she said. “Once [the criminals] start wearing out banks in Georgia, they start moving up here.”

Banks in Chattanooga and as far as north as Athens, Tenn., have been targeted, Job said.