An organized ring of thieves targeted mailboxes in southwest Miami-Dade County to steal checks and recruited Wells Fargo Bank customers in Hialeah to help them get thousands of dollars in fraudulent transactions, police said.
The scheme would not work without help from the bank’s own customers, detectives said. So far six people have been arrested, five of them Wells Fargo accountholders.
The group was headed by Frank Zaraboso, 29, a Cuban citizen who lives in Hialeah, who has been charged with multiple counts of grand theft and scheme to defraud, authorities said. In just two of the transactions, Zaraboso managed to get $9,230 and $8,750 in checks placed in Wells Fargo bank accounts, detectives told NBC Miami.
“Basically, you would have defendants that would go to mailboxes and fish through personal mail,” Hialeah Police Detective Karen Smith-Bonilla said.
The fraud began when both business and personal checks were stolen from the mail in southwest Miami-Dade, police said.
The checks in hand, Zaraboso then recruited Wells Fargo accountholders to deposit the money in ATMs, or convinced them to provide him with ATM cards and PIN numbers so he could make the deposits, according to police. That gave the alleged ring time to make a run on ATM machines before the bank caught on to the stolen checks, Smith-Bonilla said.
“They were given monetary compensation to allow their PIN and card to be used to make the counterfeit deposits,” she said.
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One of the bank customers who was recruited told police that he made a few hundred dollars for every bad deposit.
One of the victims lost over $28,000, according to police. And Zaraboso and a female associate drained one stolen $9,000 check on a BJ’s Warehouse shopping spree, police said.
Wells Fargo’s security department says it is working with police and the federal postal inspectors.
Zaraboso, of 459 E. 18th St. in Hialeah, is being represented by attorney Vicente Valerie, and a hearing for his case is set for March, according to court records.
