Groups Use Homeless To Cash Fake Checks

Agent Donna Job, resident agent in charge of the U.S. Secret Service in Chattanooga, says con artists are targeting a desperate group to carry out the cashing of fake checks-homeless people.  She says groups will search for willing homeless people at shelters in the Atlanta area and by providing money or drugs, drive them to local banks to cash bogus checks. Agent Job says the groups cloth and feed them. "If you don't have a job and you're homeless, that gets you through the day. They think, 'I want to eat today, I want to live today,'" Agent Job explains. The people in charge of the crime are said to wait across the street while the checks are being cashed.

Agent Job says homeless people being a part of the crime is a reason why counterfeit checks are so common in parts of Tennessee and North Georgia. "If you have a legitimate ID and you come and cash a check, it's a hard thing to detect sometimes," she says.

Roma Banks used to be homeless and remembers the struggle to survive every single day. He pulled his life together after years of trying times. "I got strung out on crack and stayed on it for 5 to 6 years," Banks says. So if he was offered money for walking into a bank, he says he wouldn't give it a second thought. "It would have been easy to do it. It would have been so easy," he explains.

Agent Job says people in charge of the rings of fake checks are taking advantage of people that are down and out. She says Chattanooga alone has over 100 suspects related to counterfeit checks. Many of the suspects are homeless people who have been caught in the act. Roy Johnson's the president of Providence Ministry. Hearing how criminals exploit the homeless hits close to home. "When you take the most vulnerable of society and you put them in situations that could wind them up in a lot of trouble, that's really bad," explains Johnson.