Check Forgers Smear Couple’s Spotless Record
Stay tuned Spokane for an important message from Heidi and Tim Tueth: We’re not dirtbags. Honest.
Well, of course they’re not. Married last summer, the two 23-year-olds are about as squeaky-clean as a young couple gets.
Heidi’s a dental assistant. Tim’s a construction worker. They love each other, work hard and rent a modest, yet immaculately kept, apartment in the northeast part of the city.
Unfortunately, these nice kids have a nasty chore. The Tueths are trying to convince the community they’re not check-bouncing bums.
Somewhere skulking around is a phony Heidi and Tim who are out to destroy the real Tueths’ reputation and credit rating.
Armed with a stolen box of the Tueths’ checks, these skunks have penned enough fiction to make the New York Times best-sellers’ list.
Little Caesar’s Pizza, Blockbuster Video, Schuck’s Auto Supply, Safeway, a liquor store … The haul is well over $1,000 with reports of ripped-off merchants still rolling in.
On Saturday, a Tueth check was found lying on a downtown street. Someone made it out for $50 cash, but dropped it before it was cashed.
“I’ve never hated somebody I don’t know so much,” says the frustrated real Tim. “We had excellent credit. Not one bad thing against us.”
The Tueths’ nightmare is a lesson to anyone with a checkbook and too much trust. It also shows how this particular brand of crime pays.
That’s due to a couple of factors:
First, not enough merchants properly identify check writers by asking for photo ID and enough corroborative pieces of identification.
Second, check forgers are snake-belly low on the crime totem pole at the Spokane Police Department.
“You’re talking to the Fraud Unit,” chuckles Detective Jan Pogachar, who says that an upcoming staff move may leave her as the sole investigator dealing with the avalanche of rubber checks.
Each month 100 victims in the city file police reports claiming their checks are being forged. That number is about the same for the county.
“I tell you,” says Pogachar of the bad check biz, “If I were a criminal that’s what I’d be doing. It’s easy money.”
Heidi made the first mistake.
Before the couple left for a week’s vacation in New York City, she tossed an unused box of 225 checks into the Dumpster outside her apartment complex. She got rid of them because she wasn’t satisfied with the way her name was printed bigger than her husband’s.
She double wrapped the checks in two garbage bags, but they were still found. Tearing them up is the first rule of savvy check disposal, says Pogachar.
The Tueths returned home on April 28 to find their answering machine filled with angry messages.
There is one ray of good news. Spotting an unusual amount of activity, Heidi says a quick-thinking banker froze their checking account.
Even so, the Tueths may be stuck for $800 that went through before their account was closed. Dozens of other bad checks will most likely be eaten by the gullible merchants who accepted them.
Heidi has lately been hanging her own paper. She made a flier warning merchants about her stolen checks and is sticking them in stores all over town.
This crime could easily be solved.
Two businesses videotaped the bleached-blond, 30ish woman who is claiming to be Heidi. A suspicious clerk at Manito Exxon jotted down a license plate number and a description of the woman’s Ford Escort.
But until police make check crime a real priority, only the huge cases will get something other than a superficial nod.
“If you’re going to commit a crime,” muses a fraud unit secretary, “why rob a bank when you can do this and not go to jail?”
, DataTimes