Criminals & Presidents: The Adventures of a Secret Service Agent by Tim Wood

Author:Tim Wood
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9781504983686
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Published: 2016-03-16T21:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

Nigerians in My Backyard

Not all Nigerian fraudsters were transient to Vegas; we had a couple of guys I was chasing after who were local residents. I’d received some information from a Las Vegas bank fraud investigator that four checking accounts had been opened in four different names at four different branches of the bank. The names on all four accounts were foreign, African sounding last names with common English first names such as John or Charles; typical of Nigerians. Whoever was opening the accounts was kiting checks into the accounts.

Check kiting is a simple scheme utilizing the processing delay between the bank where the check was deposited and when the check clears the bank of origin. The fraudster will deposit checks drawn on closed accounts, inflating their checking account and get access to those funds before the original bank can notify the depositing bank that the original check was worthless due to nonsufficient funds.

The investigator told me that bank surveillance photos of ATM transactions showed the same black male using all four accounts. Bank employees at a fifth branch believed the ATM photos resembled a new customer known as Charles Musigbe.

I did a drive-by of the address provided by the investigator and wrote down the license plate numbers of two cars sitting in the driveway. One was registered to Charles Musigbe and the other car was registered to Matthew Musigbe.

Charles Musigbe was of record in the LVMPD database for an application to work in a casino and I was able to get a good photo. The photo from the PD and the photos from the ATM transactions were very close. Those damn ATM photos were grainy black and white in those days, and it never failed that the angle of the lens was always off-kilter just enough that you couldn’t get a really good look at the face. But, I thought, “If it ain’t him, it’s his fucking brother.”

A different bank in Las Vegas called and reported a very similar case. This investigator, who just happened to be the Redhead, told me a man opened a checking account with a Nigerian passport and a Trinidad driver’s license. The driver’s license number was written in the format of a US Social Security number. This should have been a red flag for the teller who opened the account. If people would just take the time to stop and think, “Wait a minute, why does this customer have a Nigerian passport and a Trinidad driver’s license?” You would think they would have at least asked the customer about it! It always seemed pretty obvious to me. But, then again, I guess most people don’t think they are about to be scammed. Do you think they have US Social Security numbers in the country of Trinidad? He had been kiting checks through the account and the loss to this bank was over eight thousand dollars in five days. What? She couldn’t tell me about this over our morning coffee?

The name on this account was John Musigbe.

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