A Chesterton couple
has reported the theft of nearly $30,000 from their home-equity line of
credit and no one is quite sure how it was done.
According to
police, on Feb. 26 the couple advised that someone, somehow, managed to
duplicate three blank checks in their home-equity checkbook, then cash them:
one for $9,900, another for $9,800, and the last for $9,300, totaling
$29,000, which the victims noted is “the exact amount that was available to
be used in the account.
Which is strange,
because no one knew that the couple had opened an equity line, police said.
Police further said
that the original blank checks are still in the couple’s checkbook and that
last time the couple actually wrote a check on that account was three years
ago.
Meanwhile, the
couple discovered that someone had also ordered their mail held--via the
U.S. Postal Service’s website--from Feb. 7 through March 9. The couple
subsequently canceled that hold.
The husband added
that “no one is ever in their home if they’re not there and that their son
lives out of the area.”
The bank, for its
part, learned that after the checks were cashed, they were deposited into
two other accounts, one at a South Bend branch, the other at a Fort Wayne
branch. The funds were then wired from those accounts to an unknown bank.
The bank’s fraud investigator was planning to interview the holders of those
two accounts.
“Very little is
currently known about the incident” is what the bank’s fraud investigator
told police. The investigator did say that another of the bank’s
customers--who happens to live approximately 18 minutes from the couple--was
found to have been victimized in much the same way, police said. The
investigator was going to work that angle of the case as well.