Police on April 30 arrested a 65-year-old New Jersey woman by warrant after she stole a $112,067 U.S. Treasury check from a local resident and deposited it into a Nashville bank.
The suspect opened the account using fraudulent documents that identified her, falsely, as a New Canaan resident—a U.S. passport card, address, Social Security number and driver’s license number, according to the affidavit of New Canaan Police Officer Kelly Coughlin that forms the major part of an arrest warrant application signed April 15 by state Superior Court Judge John Blawie and obtained by NewCanaanite.com through a public records request.
The check had been deposited into an account at Fifth Third Bank in Nashville in November, and local police learned of the fraud in January, when the victim came to NCPD headquarters to report the associated identity theft.
The IRS had contacted the victim saying she would receive the large refund, but a check never arrived and the victim “initially thought it was a mistake and did not realize she was actually owed this money,” Coughlin said in the police affidavit.
“She did not know where the check may have been intercepted along the chain of being mailed to her residence,” Coughlin said in the affidavit.
The victim “contacted the IRS via telephone to advise them she never received the check and that someone had intercepted it,” the arrest warrant application said.
“When she spoke with Fifth Third Bank, they advised her that money was still in the account and that it had been frozen and flagged for fraud,” it said.
Police obtained the documents that had been used to open the fraudulent account and found that they used the New Canaan victim’s information but had a different signature and the photo on the driver’s license was of “a white female with shorter, light brown hair and glasses on,” the application said.
“She appeared to be in her 60’s,” it said. “She was wearing a plaid, collared shirt. The United States passport card had a picture of someone who appeared to be the same woman, but had shorter hair and was not wearing glasses. The card had [the New Canaan victim’s] name, date of birth and place of birth but the passport card number did not match [the victim’s] real passport card number.”
Working with multiple bank officials and law enforcement agencies—including facial recognition software experts at the Rockland County Intelligence Center in New York—New Canaan Police identified a suspect and learned that the same woman “had opened several accounts in Tennessee and was depositing U.S. Treasury checks,” Coughlin said in the affidavit.
With help from the vice president of corporate security at First Horizon Bank in Nashville, police learned that a man often accompanied the suspect in the criminal activity, who “often went to banks posing as a couple,” the application said.
Coughlin learned that the woman had a substantial criminal history and several arrests, “the most recent one being in 2021 in Greenville, S.C.,” where she was charged with “financial transaction card theft, federal chartered financial institution crime and financial identity fraud,” the application said. Her booking photo from Greenville “matched the mugshot” of the suspect.
NCPD contacted a senior special agent for the Federal Reserve Bank and special agent for the Treasury Inspector General from the Tax Administration, who are investigating “at least nine different cases at the federal level in conjunction with the U.S. Attorney’s office in Nashville, regarding incidents involving stolen U.S. Treasury checks that were deposited into fraudulent bank accounts at banks in the greater Nashville area” that involved the woman and her male accomplice.
Bank officials identified additional victims from New Canaan who’d had a bank account opened using their information, and eventually security footage was obtained from a Fifth Third Bank that identified the suspects as the same pair.
New Canaan Police obtained a warrant for first-degree larceny, criminal impersonation, third-degree forgery and third-degree identity theft.
On April 30, police traveled to Atlantic County Jail in New Jersey to take custody of the woman on the warrant. She was taken to NCPD for processing and held on $250,000 bond. After appearing the following day, she was released on a promise to appear May 18.