By Stephanie Springer - bio | email
ALBANY, GA (WALB) –Investigators say a Ben Hill County man set up a fake check making operation at his home.
They say he may have stole someone's old payroll information and used it to make and cash counterfeit checks. But investigators are still trying to figure out just how he got that information.
It takes some criminals a matter of minutes to make a fake check, cash it and spend the money.
But for investigators, counterfeit cases require lots of work.
"It takes us a couple of months to track these cases down," said Ben Hill County Investigator Patrick Hogan.
In December, Ben Hill County Sheriff's investigators got word that counterfeit checks were showing up at the Colony Bank Corporation.
"We learned that basically what was happening was these payroll checks of a local Ben Hill county business American Blanching had been duplicated," said Hogan.
A total of nine bad checks surfaced most of which were made payable to Justin Jackson.
"He copied the information from the check, scanned it into his own computer used a program that's readily available and check stock that's readily available and transferred it onto checks," said Hogan.
A method Investigators are seeing more of.
"The problem comes in here when they are using the account information that belongs to someone else that is a type of identity theft," said Hogan.
Jackson didn't cash the checks at a bank he took them to local businesses to collect the money.
"Most of the time offenders in these cases will take these to a convenience store or package store that isn't exactly monitoring information that's coming in," said Hogan.
But thanks to alert business owners, authorities were able to arrest Jackson.
"The big break in this case is the local businesses did check the ids from the people they were taking the checks from," said Hogan.
What may of seemed like a good idea at the time cost the offender time behind bars.
"Apparently he was planning on having a pretty good Christmas holiday. He had a pocket full of cash, but unfortunately for him he was able to spend his Christmas vacation in the Ben Hill county jail," said Hogan.
Investigators say if a business cashes checks, employees need to make sure they check the person's ID and record all information and make sure surveillance video is properly working.
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