In my fifteen years the smartest and most capable criminal I have had contact with defrauded banks. To this the day I'm certain he was involved with the so-called Russian Mob out of Southern California. He had numerous fake California driver licenses all with his photos on them, but the people he was pretending to be actually existed and were account holders with the bank that he was ripping off. The date of births, the California DL numbers all belonged to the people he was pretending to be.
He also had numerous fake credit cards and counterfeit checks to back-up his fake ID's. We caught him by dumb luck and a very sharp bank-teller who remembered seeing his photo taken by a security camera at a branch office in Fort Lauderdale, Florida a few days before. He had a rental car, roundtrip airplane tickets to Los Angeles, map quest directions to every single branch office in the Boise area (we were his last stop way over in the western end of the valley) and condoms and no drugs. Not even any booze. He took care of himself and cooperated with us....to a point. No weapons of any kind. Not that kind of criminal.
He had a receipt from Western Union showing that he had wired money to somebody in L.a. a couple days before and he had $8,000 dollars in brand new bills on his person. Which I'm sure was his share. he never gave up his associates. He got five years in prison up here in Idaho. He served all five years. Didn't want parole.
Here's the best part. three years into his sentence he argued in court that the money we took from him was his and he wanted it back. We couldn't prove it was from a criminal enterprise and we couldn't make the connection. So i had to deposit all that cash into his convict bank account. Prisoners can earn money while in prison and it goes into their account which they get when they get out.
Know what I learned from that investigation? That banks don't keep track of serial numbers. I couldn't show that it came from one of the other branch offices in the valley. None of the other branch offices reported being defrauded by him. i could never get the head of their security to return my phone calls. The F.B.I. didn't care even though it was estimated that he and his unidentified associates had taken Washington Mutual for over $1,000,000. It was 2003 and everything was about terrorists. The Secret Service was no help either. So he got out of prison with several thousand dollars and went back to California and probably went back to work for his russian employers. He had some serious logistics backing him up.
Smart criminal. No violence and no guns. Have to admire that guy.
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