Canceled Checks : Teen-Agers With Bank Accounts Fall for Scam; 4 Suspects Sought

Seven San Fernando Valley teen-agers are the victims of an elaborate scheme that they helped carry out by allowing thousands of dollars in forged checks to be deposited in their savings accounts, police said Wednesday.

They and their parents must now repay--in some cases from the teen-agers’ college savings--$61,000 in stolen funds, police said.

Los Angeles police are searching for four suspected confidence tricksters, including two men who they believe originated the plot to steal money from banks by exploiting the youths.

The two other suspects, Jabari McDavid and Trenell Floyd, both 19, are wanted on suspicion of persuading seven past and present students from Taft, Chatsworth, Canoga Park and Granada Hills high schools to hand over their checking and savings account numbers as well as automated teller machine cards and personal identification numbers, LAPD Detective P.J. Green said.

The information was then used to deposit hundreds of bad checks into the students’ accounts, usually through ATMs or night drop boxes, Green said. Once the checks were credited to the account--but before they could be rejected by the bank they were drawn upon--the unwitting students withdrew the money and handed it over to McDavid and Floyd, who paid the youths $50 to $100 each for their services, Green said.

Sometimes the withdrawals were made by other people posing as the students, or by using the ATM cards and PIN numbers, Green said.

McDavid and Floyd convinced the youths that they were serving as innocent middlemen to cash checks for McDavid and Floyd because they did not have bank accounts, and that they would not get into trouble for handing over the cash, said Detective Tim Gipson said.

McDavid and Floyd apparently sought out youths who had their own bank accounts, usually opened with the help of their parents for savings purposes, by talking to teen-agers at high school basketball games, parks and other youth gatherings, Gipson said.

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“It was a well-thought-out and elaborate scheme that these kids were basically duped into by friends, the very people they trust,” Green said. “They didn’t realize that at some point in time hard questions were going to be asked and that they were going to have to face the music.”

The scam apparently involved eight banks and was carried out between May and November of last year.

Typically the students would withdraw the money from their accounts before bank officials had time to detect the checks had been stolen, forged or written on closed accounts.

But bank officials nabbed two of the naive youths when they showed up to withdraw money several days after depositing the bad checks, Green said. A 16-year-old Granada Hills High School student and a 17-year-old Chatsworth High School student were arrested inside the banks and later prosecuted in juvenile court, where they were placed on probation and ordered to make restitution.

Other students were discovered after bank officials froze their accounts, some of which contained thousands of dollars in college savings that will now be used to make restitution, Green said.

The case began to unfold last June when a student, who described himself as a football player from Taft High School, confessed to police after a credit union froze a savings account he held with his mother that contained $8,000, Green said. The youth told police that he had been approached by McDavid and Floyd, a former Taft student he knew from school.

“They asked him if he wanted to make some money,” Green said. The youth agreed to go along and as a result is now in the process of repaying $15,000 to the credit union.

In the following months, more students began to trickle in, most of whom named McDavid and Floyd as those who had gotten them involved in the scam, Green said. No charges have been filed against the other five students because they and their parents have cooperated with the investigation and have agreed to make restitution.

“The parents were in shock and they were disappointed,” Green said. “This was money they were saving for college, car insurance and some of the money the students had saved from jobs.”

Some students said that after they discovered that the checks they deposited had bounced, McDavid and Floyd “used force and intimidation” to make them find other teen-agers with bank accounts to drag into the scheme, Gipson said.

Police are searching for McDavid and Floyd, both of whom have prior theft convictions and may be hiding out in Canoga Park or Chatsworth, Green said. Warrants were issued for their arrests Tuesday and each man faces multiple counts of grand theft.

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Green said McDavid and Floyd are believed to be middlemen, who received a cut of the profits, but that the originators of the scheme have not been identified. Some of the victims said that when McDavid and Floyd collected the money, they were accompanied by two other men police are now seeking.

News of the alleged fraud shocked school officials at Taft and Granada Hills high schools Wednesday, who promised to warn their students against such schemes.

“This is very serious,” said Al Shafer, dean of discipline at Granada Hills High School. “We don’t want our students to become victims.”