Written by Shari R. Pogach, Regulatory Paralegal
To wind down the last few lazy days of summer, I thought I’d share this unusual financial fraud case I found on the FBI’s website. You just can’t make this stuff up.
Tamira Fonville and her partner, Ricardo Falana, would go up and down the Interstate 95 corridor from New York to Washington, DC. They would go to shopping malls and target the young college-age women who spent time there. Using fake names, Fonville would recruit women to participate in a supposedly upcoming hair show. She would talk up the hair show and offer to pay the women for their services to participate. But in order to pay the young women she required their debit card numbers and access to their accounts. Then Falana would deposit bogus checks into the legitimate accounts and immediately withdraw them before the bank realized the fraud.
According to the FBI investigator on the case, Special Agent Sean Norman, Fonville and Falana made a lot of money for several years. Banks and other financial institutions lost approximately $600,000. This is how the scam would go down:
“On a typical recruiting trip, Fonville might talk with 20 or 30 women and would follow up with text messages using disposable phones whose numbers could not be traced. If she ended up with three or four willing participants, that was enough.
‘Some took the hair show bait and handed over their debit cards and PINs,’ Norman said. ‘Others who were skeptical got a different pitch,’ he explained. ‘They were told: ‘I can make money appear in your account. You will get some money, I will get some money, and the bank won’t lose anything.’
With access to legitimate accounts not tied to him, Falana deposited forged checks of up to $10,000 and then withdrew money before the bank realized the checks were bad. Many of the victims were coached to tell bank investigators that their debit cards had been stolen and their PINs were written on the cards.
‘The majority of the account holders knew they were doing something fraudulent,’ Norman said. ‘They thought they were going to get something out of it, but they got nothing.’”
Court documents indicate that between 2008 and 2013, Fonville personally benefited to the tune of more than $230,000. Fonville even told investigators she viewed the scam as a career.
Fonville and Falana pled guilty to bank fraud charges and went to prison. Fonville was sentenced to 15 months and Falana to 80 months.
What will they think of next?
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