Twelve thousand dollars is back where it belongs - in the hands of a small business owner. After one of her checks was stolen out of the mail and cashed out of state, the business owner said she spent months trying to get help from her bank.
Just two days after NBC 5 Responds reached out to Chase Bank, that stolen $12,000 was put back in her bank account.
The company, M&M Express, is a father-daughter trucking business that has grown a lot over two decades in Addison. It has gone from one truck to eight, and from two Ms, to just one.
“My dad and I opened the company in 2005. He passed a couple years ago, and so now it's just me. So instead of ‘Mike and Misty’, it's ‘Misty,'" said Misty Fitzgerald, the owner of M&M Express.
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Now running the company on her own, Fitzgerald has to be an organized leader.
“I keep copies of all checks that go out,” she said.
When Fitzgerald got a message last fall, that one of her vendors hadn’t received a $12,000 check she put in the mail, she immediately checked her Chase business account.
“I was like, ‘Oh, the check was cashed.' I looked at the printed version of the check and it was to [someone else]. It was not to the vendor. Somebody had whited out the name that I wrote the check for and put their own name,” said Fitzgerald. “It's not even the same font.”
NBC 5 Responds
NBC 5 Responds couldn’t find any record of a person with the same name and address as what was listed on the altered check. Fitzgerald filed a fraud claim and said that Chase Bank told her it would take 60 to 90 days to process.
“They had no answers whatsoever,” said Fitzgerald. “We're a small company, $12,000 to us is a lot, you know?”
“It was very obvious that it was fraud, but yet Chase kept saying ‘we're investigating’ and it just wasn't right,” said Hayden Lynch, Fitzgerald’s employee and longtime friend. After watching Fitzgerald struggle with Chase, he decided to turn to NBC 5 Responds for help - unbeknownst to his boss.
“I was sitting at home one night and you're on TV, and I was like ‘PJ!’” said Lynch.
So NBC 5 Responds reached out to Chase and soon Fitzgerald got a call.
“Two days after NBC contacted Chase, like a CEO or someone higher up, contacted me … and told me it was all resolved and the money was back in my account,” said Fitzgerald. “I was like 'Wow.' Months, six months, I've been calling, crying, being nice, trying to be mean, and nothing worked. Two days, that's all it took.”
At the same time, a Chase spokesperson told NBC 5 Responds: “We spoke with Ms. Fitzgerald today to let her know the receiving bank approved her claim, which was submitted to the receiving bank in September. We credited her account and apologized for the delay.”
A spokesperson for Chase Bank tells NBC 5 Responds they had been working to recover Fitzgerald's funds from the receiving bank since September. Despite their best efforts, the Chase Bank Spokesperson says they could not return the money until Regions Bank, which cashed the fraudulent check, agreed to return the funds.
NBC 5 Responds reached out to Regions Bank for comment. Jennifer Elmore, A spokeswoman for Regions Bank told NBC 5 Responds: "Regions handles claims of potential fraud with a high sense of urgency. We are pleased the matter is now resolved.”
“Every little penny counts for, you know, the small guy,” said Fitzgerald.
“You guys are the voice that some of the small companies or individuals don't have,” Lynch said.
Fitzgerald said she’s not mailing out many checks anymore, and she was never able to learn anything more about who actually cashed her stolen check.
Key takeaways
If you still use checks, here are some key takeaways to prevent this from happening to you:
- Don’t leave your checks unattended in a U.S. Postal Service mailbox. Use only monitored and safe drop-off places.
- Write your checks with gel pen ink,. so they can’t be washed.
- Consider using digital payment methods, which can be traced, instead of checks.
