But in citing the apparently phony check, prosecutors asserted today that Mr. Estrada was guilty of a range of chicanery worthy of an underworld boss.
He said that he was sworn to protect her name but that he was able to persuade her to buy $4,500 in postal money orders with a phony check.
Inside, invariably, was a phony check for $25,000 and an 800-number that fed into a cavernous sales center in a converted Kmart in Mission Viejo, Calif.
At the last meeting, on Wednesday, the lawyer gave Halderman a phony check for $2 million, Morgenthau said.
In a federal indictment made public in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., the authorities say Ingram cashed more than $300,000 in phony checks and laundered another $200,000.
Prosecutors said that the company, the RW Professional Leasing Corporation, concocted elaborate schemes using up to 100 rented mailboxes as far away as California to send phony checks, sham invoices, bogus leases and other false documents to banks in various states.
It is based on the autobiography and the Steven Spielberg movie of the same name, about the con artist Frank Abagnale, Jr. (played onscreen by Leonardo DiCaprio), who, some forty-five yeago ago, impersonated an airline pilot, a pediatrician, and a lawyer — all before the age of twenty-one — in the process cashing two and a half million dollars' worth of phony checks.
Banking giant Wells Fargo agreed to pay a $185 million fine last week, after it was discovered that its employees have opened than 2 million phony checking and credit card accounts in its customers' names.
Around the same time Ansary won her judgment, a Washington, D.C. grand jury indicted Shmuckler for bank fraud for allegedly cutting himself $2.4 million worth in phony checks in 2005.
Identity theft, stolen credit cards, phony checks, benefits fraud, network hacking, and other impostor scams to defraud businesses, government agencies and consumers costs billions of dollars per year.
At the moment, Pack was analyzing a hard drive seized by the police in a phony-check-writing operation that had victimized Target stores.
