Five more people from Northwest Philadelphia reached out to the Local last week to share their stories about stolen checks. 

Two of the six checks that Mt. Airy resident Kittura Dior mailed from the Market Square Post Office collection box in early to mid-June were washed and stolen - one for $165.68 and another for $180. The other four checks were lost in the mail.

“You could see that it was altered,” Dior said. “You could see the Wite Out and another name was put in.”

Unlike some other stolen and washed checks, the total amount on the check wasn’t altered in either of Dior’s stolen checks - only the payee name. Dior doesn’t specifically remember who the checks were originally made out to, but said they were for “general utility and subscription bills.” The name of the payee was whited out and changed to the name “Briana Abney.”

The checks were drawn on a joint Santander account that Dior shares with her mother. Based on the bank’s recommendation, Dior said, she had Santander close out her account after she discovered the theft. She also filed a police report with the 14th District.

“The police district said there had been a rash of this happening in the area,” Dior said. “They said that someone has keys to the mailbox in the area. They believe there’s an inside connection to get these keys and said that this had been happening for months.”

After filing a fraud report, Dior said Santander gave her the money back. Her “old school” mother writes most of the checks, Dior said. But she’s at least partially persuaded her to stop doing that.

“I’ve tried to encourage her not to [write checks anymore] and she’s reluctantly considering it,” she said. “It’s likely she’s going to lean into not doing checks anymore, but I don’t think she really wants to do that.”

The remaining four sources asked the Local to withhold their names.

The first of the four anonymous sources mailed her check on July 24 at the USPS collection box in front of the Chestnut Hill Post Office. She doesn’t specifically remember who it was made out to, but thinks that it was probably an electric bill made out for around $50. 

On Aug. 3 she checked her bank account and saw that money was missing. Upon further inspection she found that the check she mailed on July 24 had cleared on July 27 for $3,900.51 - an amount that had clearly been fraudulently written on the check. The name on the check, Courtney Bond, was not a name the source recognized.

“When I looked at the check, it wasn’t my handwriting and it wasn’t my husband’s handwriting,” she said. “Clearly somebody wrote another amount.”

The source alerted her bank, BNY Mellon, about the fraud. When she spoke with the local last week, she was planning to file a police report, but hadn’t yet. She hopes her money will be returned. In the future, the source said she’s going to mail the checks inside the post office.

“I’ll supervise my mail now,” she said. “I won’t put it in another [collection] box again.”

The second anonymous source wrote a check for $1,637.58 to a company that had completed some tree work on her property. She mailed it from the Market Square Post Office collection box some time during the Fourth of July weekend.

After a few days, “The tree company asked me when to expect the balance payment,” said the source. “I said ‘You got it. It was cashed.’”

The only problem, the source found out, was that it was cashed by the wrong person.

“I looked at the check and saw somebody had replaced the payee name and cashed it,” said the source. “You could still see the bottom of my writing that they didn’t completely blot out.”

The amount on the check wasn’t changed.

The source went to her bank, Citizens Bank, at the end of the previous week to file a fraud claim. The source received a letter back on July 29 saying that Citizens “determined that the check in question does not appear to have been altered” and that she can follow up with more information to proceed with her fraud claim.

Despite the notification from Citizens Bank, pictures of the check show the payee name, “Donovan Bunch,” written in handwriting that is clearly and obviously different from the rest of the check. 

Citizens Bank spokesperson Eleni Garbis told the Local that the source’s claim “has not been denied” and that the bank is seeking information it needs to “process the altered check claim with the bank of first deposit.”

“They asked for more proof,” said the source, who added that she’s following up on the fraud claim. 

The third anonymous source said she mailed her check in early May or late April at the collection box in front of the Mt. Airy Post Office, located at the corner of Germantown Avenue and Phil Ellena Street. She was aware of the ongoing issue with stolen checks in the area, but figured this particular collection box was safe since it was right in front of the post office. She was wrong.

“I don’t normally send checks in the mail,” she said, “but the person I was paying could only take a check and lives in Central Pennsylvania.”

When the intended recipient still hadn’t received the check after about two weeks, the source checked her bank account and found that the check, which was written for $5,333, had been stolen and washed. Interestingly, the source washed the entire check, the source said, but rewrote everything, including the memo, dollar amount and date in new handwriting, exactly how it was before it was washed - just in new handwriting. The only actual words that were different in the washed version of the check was the different name on the payee line. 

Within a week of reporting the fraud to Bank of America, $5,000 of the source’s $5,333 was returned. She later received the remaining $333.

The source said she’s already curtailed her check writing and mailing, but in this particular case, it couldn’t be avoided.

“I think it can’t always be escaped,” she said. “In this instance, I couldn’t avoid it. The person I was mailing a check to didn’t have Venmo or Paypal.”

In the past, the source said, she’s tried to mail letters by handing them directly to workers inside the Mt. Airy Post Office, but the workers had given her “a hard time” about it.

“They say if you’re mailing a letter and it's already stamped just drop it in the box,” she said.

In those instances, she said, the workers took the mail but “they’ve kind of rolled their eyes,”  she said, “but I felt discouraged from doing it again.”

Unlike the previous sources, the last source the Local spoke to last week never had a check washed, but perhaps had checks stolen. In fact, the source mailed three checks from the Germantown Avenue and Gravers Lane collection box in January for bills, two of which were to Comcast and the third to PGW. The two Comcast checks were made out for $177.19 and $238.48. The PGW bill was for $345.64.

When the source got notices from Comcast and PGW about the bills not being paid, she realized the checks must’ve been either lost in the mail or stolen.

“I think it’s an entirely different issue than somebody taking my checks, stealing them and then forging a different name,” she said. “But it leads to a feeling I can’t trust the mail here anymore.”

The source had to place holds on each of the three checks, for which her bank charges $30 a pop.

“It was an awful lot of aggravation,” she said.