Chesterton Tribune

 

 

Police say couple's account mysteriously plundered

Back To Front Page

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.

 

 

Posted 3/3/2015

 

 
 

 

 

 

Â