Washii Ponderings

I was watching The Today Show this morning, where they interviewed a lady whom was a retired VP from Wells Fargo. Several years back, her wallet was stolen while on a trip to San Francisco. (Link – Story at the San Francisco Chronicle)

She did all the right things: filed reports with the police and her bank, canceled the credit cards, filed fraud alerts with the credit agencies. Some time passes. Then, police call to tell her she would be arrested for felony fraud.

The police came to her home, arrested her and walked her out in front of all her neighbors, handcuffed. She was arrested for 19 counts of felony fraud and some other ‘identify theft’-related crimes. The identity theft victim became the suspect.

For over half a year she fought in court. Turns out she was fully arraigned because her handwriting (from a handwriting test) was so similar to the handwriting on checks cashed by a specific woman who pulled over 60,000 dollars from various Well Fargo customers. That included this lady’s bank account. The DAs never inspected her banking or phone records, and it took those months to even fingerprint any of the checks, even though they fingerprinted her within days of being arrested.

Shocker? None of the checks had this lady’s fingerprints on them. The DA dropped the charges on grounds of insufficient evidence to convict. The police detectives publicly stated to the newspapers that they still believed this woman should go to jail. She’s a prime suspect only because her handwriting was similar to that on the fraudulent checks.

And the justice system…it isn’t corrupt? This woman is now attempting to be reimbursed some of the $50,000 she paid to her attorneys; money that some puny DA, with absolutely no evidence, essentially defrauded of her. That leaves out roughly $20,000 that Wells Fargo had to reimburse for cashing out the fraudulent checks. And they probably only did that because she was a retired VP.