So the day after we found out about the land, Dad had a dentist appointment scheduled to have a tooth extracted and I told him I would take him. He also wanted to go to the bank and credit union where his savings were located to try and secure his accounts because he knew that it needed to be done. We had no idea what to expect.
With gauze in my dad's mouth, we headed to the bank where his checking account was located. We walked up to the counter and asked for the most recent list of transactions. The young guy printed up the statement and handed it to me. Dad and I started looking at the same time and he didn't recognize any of the charges on his account.
I grabbed a pen and started marking all the transactions, after seeing how many I was marking the teller asked if I wanted a highlighter instead. I started marking with the highlighter the charges Dad didn't recognize and soon stopped. It was almost every transaction on the page. Seeing that this was going to be excessive, we asked if we could get the past 4 years bank statements. Of course they agreed, and moved us to a desk with an account representative. Dad looked at me and said "I don't understand, I have all my bank statements at home." I didn't understand either. It was all here line by line. As the massive amounts of paper began to print, we started to see more and more unfold. I sat there and went through the statements with Dad and he pointed out the hundreds possibly thousands of debits,checks and ATM transactions that were not his.
Her name was not on the checking account, but Dad would let her use his debit card for groceries and to pay bills. But, he always had everything recorded in his check register. He pulled it out and laid it on the desk, but it didn't match anything. Nothing. Not even the amount paid on the electric bill. We sat stunned. So where did his numbers come from? He kept telling me, "but I balanced my checkbook with my statements." I told him we would just have to look at them when we got back to his house.
Another stunning find in the bank statements were a ridiculous number of checks that she had written and forged my dad's name. So because of the history she had, Dad assumed that she was taking checks out of the back of his book and writing them. Several months later, we would later find out she had ordered her own set of checks online and was using that set so none of Dad's checks were missing.
We closed that account and changed all the info to ensure she wouldn't be able to access it from here on out and put every fraud deterrent the bank had available on the new account. After two hours we left carrying a very large stack of papers. We went and got back into my car and sat for a few minutes just to let our minds process it all for a bit. My dad was devastated. And even though his retirement check had been deposited the day before, there was very little money actually left. What do you do? What do you say?
So our next stop was to the credit union where Dad had his savings account. He said he had over $8000 in his account, but it was held by the IRS for the taxes "she messed up on." But he said the money was supposed to be released in the next few weeks.
We were escorted into an office with and account specialist. Dad asked the bank rep to pull up his account to see if there was anything he could do. In pulling up the account, it was overdrawn $5. I remember looking at my dad sitting to my left with his jaw dropped open and you could see the bloody gauze sitting in his cheek, and I knew this was going to be more difficult than we imagined.
The emotions at this point are hard to explain. Of course, there was never any IRS hold. At one point in time there was a good amount of money in the account. Again, her name is not on that account either, how did she get access. Every transaction was done online. She registered my dad's account online and would transfer the money to the checking account. There was no money left. To get the account current, my dad paid the bank $6 out of his wallet to take care of the overdraft. We did anything we needed on that account to ensure it's security as well.
Drained from the day we decided to head back to Dad's house. He had texted her off and on all day as we found of course, she denied it all. I just rolled my eyes. How could she deny it at this point?
We had filled Justin in on everything going on and I asked him to meet me out at Dad's so we could go through the bank statements and try to make sense of things. Dad was in shock and didn't even know where to begin. I don't know that I did either.
Because of the frustration, Dad went and pulled everything out of the filing cabinet looking for the bank statements he had kept for "tax purposes." He handed me everything, and every night for the next two weeks poured through documents.
We found the bank statements.
Years worth of bank statements.
Dad kept them folded neatly in a shoe box in case he ever needed them. I am so glad he did. Because, each one of them were completely fake. Yeah, years and years worth of fake bank statements. Again, looking like a sloppy word document with the bank's logo on the left hand side and Dad's checking account number on it and all the transactions in his check book register. Perfectly balanced to the penny. Comparing the fakes to the real statements ... they aren't even close. And, you can see typos. Messed up or duplicate dates, and numbers here and there. Just a random example pulled out of the pile, in the month of July 2015 the actual bank statement shows the balance as $-15.16 but on the fake statement he received that month it showed he had $345.55. This is why they never had any money. It was a very consistent pattern.
For 27 years, my dad had never seen a real bank statement.
There were even postage stamped envelopes the statements were in. I will include those in this post. I will edit out my Dad's address tho. So here's what pieces we put together as best as we could. She was putting the mail on hold to keep Dad from seeing anything that she didn't want him to see, bills, collections, notices, etc. and, creating the bank statements at work and running it through their postage meters. But if you will notice on the envelopes, there's no post mark. Meaning it wasn't mailed, so she had to be putting the fake statements in the mailbox herself when Dad wasn't around. Then, when he got home, he would have a bank statement to balance his checkbook.
YEARS!
We can confirm about 15 but the reality is, it was probably their whole marriage. We never got a clear answer on how she kept track of what Dad had in his register to make the statement look correct. Justin and I even asked her how did she even get any work done because this had to have been a full time job. Her response was "I didn't."
This felt like something out of a movie.
There were so many questions.
This all had to be all of it. It had to be over.
And again, we were wrong.
😱😱😱so many typos!!!! Wow. Just wow.