Seven Red

When Seven Red lived in San Francisco, I worked as a fraud investigator for P——- Bank, a credit card company.  It wasn’t as CSI as it sounds. I basically went to work everyday, where I found a list of about 300 flagged accounts. The accounts had been flagged for a variety of reasons, but it was mostly third party checks and strange large payments on maxed out new accounts. My job was primarily to prevent check kiting, so I would go through the list, calling banks and sometimes the customer or check writer to make sure that the checks were authorized and drew on sufficient funds. About 80% of the checks were fine, somebody’s mother-in-law paying off a large balance, and that sort of thing. It was the other 20% – the fraud cases – that made the job fun.

Of the 20% fraud cases, most were professional check kiters. They committed credit card fraud for a living. These people were ghosts. They would apply for an account under a fake name, run up the balance to the maximum, pay that off with a bad check (usually a stolen “convenience” check either grabbed out of a mailbag or bought on the black market), run up the balance again, and rinse and repeat until the account was shut down. They used post office boxes or Mailboxes Etc, and tried to mask those as apartment buildings. They had cloned cell phones that could not be connected to them personally. They essentially didn’t exist except as accounts. My job wasn’t to “catch” anybody. Rather, I was just there to stop the bleeding on these fraud accounts.I actually enjoyed dealing with the professional kiters, because there was never any bullshit. Sure, they’d try to talk you into accepting the bad check so they could kite the account one more time, but usually they just accepted that that account was dead. Since most of these people had multiple fraud accounts circulating in various banks, they weren’t too concerned when one dried up. It was a volume operation. I even had one guy tell me straight out, “OK, I guess you closed this one. I’ll hit you guys up for another couple thousand next month.” I replied, “Alright, man. Talk to you then.” I admired these guys. They were professionals, and, in a way, so was I. It was a game, and I enjoyed playing it. Needless to say, I didn’t give a good goddamn about P——- Bank or its fraud losses, but the puzzle solving and “competitiveness” aspect of the job meant that I ended up doing well, and stopping a lot of fraud accounts.

One of my favorite stories. When I was a teenager, I had various reasons for wanting to be out all night, as my readers are well aware. I was not, however, allowed to stay out all night. That was a problem. So, we all used to game our parents by telling them that we would be staying at so-and-so’s house that night. Like most parents, my folks insisted that I leave a phone number if I was staying at so-and-so’s house for the night. That’s where the fun starts. In the 718 area code (for Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx), there exists some glitch in the phone system. If you dial any real exchange (the first three numbers), and follow that up with the numbers 9970, you get a busy signal. It still works. I just tried. So, for example, 718-539-9970 uses a real exchange (539), and it gets a busy signal. Ditto 359, another real exchange. Go ahead and try it. It will be busy every time. You can, of course, see where this is going. We all used to provide our parents with a phone number of this sort. If they tried to call to verify or location, oops, busy. This was a very useful information tool when you wanted to be out in the city at all hours of the night and up to no fucking good.

So, here I am in San Francisco checking out yet another fraud account, and I look at the address (I always looked at the address first, since Miami, Brooklyn, and Detroit addresses were high prevalence for fraud at the time, and I knew all the Mailboxes Etc locations in those areas). Hey, wattaya know! This guy is listed as living just two blocks from where I grew up in Queens. Huh, here I am all the way across the country, etc. Then I see the phone number listed for the account: 718-461-9970. 9970, I think. No fucking way. That’s a fraud account. Imagine the bad luck of this fraudster to run into me as a fraud checker in San Francisco! I even got to talk to this stooge on his cell phone (cloned), and advised him that I was wise to the trick. He was impressed, but the guy was a pro: talk to you again next month. Maybe, but not with this trick, pal. His account got blocked, and I advised my manager about the old 9970 trick. When they ran a check, they found 32 live accounts using the same dirty home phone. I didn’t get a bonus, but, as you can see, it was kinda a fun job that way.

So now to the small minority of the amateur fraudsters, maybe 5-7% of total. These people I despised. They were uniformly stupid, and always left some trail that led directly back to them, personally. Their stories were often tawdry, kids stealing from their parents or grandparents. People ripping off their employers. One woman worked in the mailroom of a hospital, and tried to kite her account with a check she took right out of the mail in her own station. She  literally crossed out the hospital’s name on the PAY TO line, wrote in P——– Bank, and sent it to us. Third party check, instantly flagged and just as instantly confirmed as fraud when I contacted the account holder and the original payee. This woman used her own real name on her account, so the hospital identified her immediately. It was pathetic, and she went to jail, and I don’t like sending people to jail. I truly hated these fuckers, because they were really bad and really transparent. When you got them on the phone – and you always did – they would spew the worst lies and continue with them even in the face of contrary evidence, which I always took as a personal insult to my intelligence. They’d delay you and dodge you, meaning that their obvious fraud accounts would stay on my daily list of 300 flagged accounts until I could make a solid determination, increasing my work for the day. They made me so mad that I would make it my mission each day to be as rude to them as possible – a posture that was certainly encouraged by management. If you’re going to be a criminal, at least be good at what you do.

Why this long post on my old fraud days? That’s the read I get off this Sarah Palin knucklehead. She’s like a bad fraudster, distasteful and the worst sort of liar. She’s caught out there again and again with her ridiculous lies, and yet keeps on with them, insisting against all reason that the lie holds. It actually makes you respect the form of fraud committed by Bush and Cheney, who are at least good at their lies, like our professional fraudsters at P——- Bank. But this Palin? It’s strictly amateur hour with Palin. Atrios noted earlier this week that repeating the lies in the most obvious way is not a bug but a feature of the Palin candidacy. It’s meant to piss you off, and energizes the GOP base whenever liberals or lefties yelp in outrage over the boldness of her lies. That’s probably right. But still. Could such a cheap seat fraud succeed?

One case I’ll never forget. A secretary was robbing an old dentist in Alabama. She had established two credit card accounts, one at P—— Bank and one at MBNA, and she was just charging the shit out of them, paying each off with the other (MBNA was notorious for accepting all convenience check charges, regardless of obvious illegitimacy). Moreover, it turns out she was in cahoots with the dentist’s wife. That meant that we couldn’t reach the dentist himself either at home or at the office, since the secretary and the wife would block our access to him, knowing full well that he had no clue these accounts even existed in his name. Pure amateur hour fraud. She even had it set up so that the alternate number, supposedly to an accountant, led to another line on her desk. She would literally pretend to be the accountant on that line, though it was obviously her. I remember that she used to say “You betcha!” a lot. You betcha this. You betcha that. It made me furious. Funny story. I had another investigator across from me call the accountant’s line while I was on the phone with the secretary. She was sitting there putting us each on hold to talk to the other. So, she would talk to me as the secretary, then put me on hold, and talk to my colleague as the accountant. Back and forth, back and forth. Then we sprung the trap. I exchanged phones with my colleague in the middle of a hold. She thought she had confused the lines, so the “accountant” started talking to me as the secretary, and my colleague as the “accountant.” What a fucking joke she was. But the “dentist” kept paying the minimum on the MBNA account, and they kept paying us, and we had no confirmation, so we couldn’t close his account.

Finally, after two weeks of this (most cases were closed in two days or less), I managed to get the dentist on the line. He refused to believe that his sweet secretary would try to rob him. I faxed him evidence, I explained the whole fraud in detail, I went over it with him again and again. We got the fraud department at MBNA on the line and they confirmed it as well. He was ten grand in the hole to both banks behind this fraud. He refused to believe it. I faxed this guy checks in his name to an account he didn’t know existed, and he refused to believe it. My manager, equally enraged by this fraud, told him that he either pay the balance in full or press charges against the secretary. He opted to pay the balance. I went out and got drunk. We closed the account down that day.

Could such a cheap fraud succeed? Yes. You betcha.

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