Store announced that it was having a sale and "We are authorized to accept relief checks.
Working 12-hour days, these volunteers have signed off on $35 million in relief checks for about 2,300 families.
But the giant carriers like AT&T, SBC Communications and Verizon see no need to write relief checks to the equipment industry.
Frauds included prison inmates receiving relief checks, and thousands of other people who filed duplicate claims or received rental assistance while living in government-paid housing.
NEW YORK TIMES Twitter to Let Advertisers Personalize Messages | WALL STREET JOURNAL Mortgage Relief Checks Go Out, Only to Bounce | Relief checks issued as part of a settlement over foreclosure abuses have bounced, an unfortunate twist for consumers who have already faced problems over reviews of troubled mortgage loans.
Soon afterward, he made known his views about welfare in response to an editorial in The Daily News, which asserted, "Ladies have babies by assorted gentlemen so as to keep the relief checks growing fatter each year".
On a recent morning, for example, Paula Zahn, the CNN anchorwoman, inadvertently implied that the Red Cross was doling out six-figure relief checks as she discussed the plight of a widow who lost her 31-year-old husband.
Their method for distributing relief checks is a convoluted bureaucracy in which a widow from New Jersey, for example, is expected to apply for help through a builders' group in Staten Island.
In a former furniture store in Falls Church, Va., dozens of American Red Cross volunteers sit at desks decorated with tiny American flags, approving hundreds of relief checks to cover $4,500 mortgage checks, $500 car payments, funeral costs, school tuition, nannies, dental bills -- often with no questions asked.
"We were neither funded nor staffed on a scale commensurate with the task for writing direct relief checks to some 3,000 victim families, and there was a big debate about whether we should do it," said Shawn Pattison, a spokesman for the foundation.
Iowa Representative Steve King has already raised the specter of people using relief checks to buy Gucci bags.
