Crime Watch

Mail FailTwo incidents of checks being intercepted in the mail and altered to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars over the holiday season. On December 15, a 62-year-old man living on Riverside Drive wrote a check from his Chase account payable to his attorneys. He mailed the check using the mailbox on the northwest corner of West 100th Street and West End Avenue. A few weeks later, he was notified by his bank that someone had tried to cash the check and that the check had been forged, deducting $60,000 from his account.

On December 23, the 42-year-old female owner of an Amsterdam Avenue restaurant mailed her business rent check to her landlord using the mailbox located at West 93rd Street and Amsterdam Avenue. She later told police that the landlord never received the check, and the check was deposited into a fraudulent TD bank account. Jonathan Kane, 28, was arrested on January 18 on a charge of grand larceny. The amount of that rent check was $31,754.67.

Clone MoanAnd the ID thefts keep on coming. A 53-year-old woman living on West 94th Street reported on Dec. 18 and 19, someone had cloned her Capital One credit card and made purchases totaling $26,417.64 at an Apple store, Bloomingdale’s and Best Buy.

Shady PerpSometime between 7:30 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. on Tuesday, January 12, someone entered the parish office in the Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew at 263 West 86th St. and took a laptop from the office desk. The director of the church told police that church personnel were very busy that evening holding meetings. She last saw her laptop at 5 p.m., and the door to the office had been left unlocked. A search of the building revealed nothing except a pair of sunglasses left behind on the office desk, apparently by the perpetrator. The stolen laptop was a Dell Vostro 14 3000 series valued at $2,000, along with a power cord priced at $50.

checks forged On Jan. 12, an 84-year-old man living on Columbus Avenue reported to police that someone had written unauthorized checks from his Citibank checking account and cashed the checks at unknown locations. He said he did not believe that any checks were missing from his checkbooks. Two forged checks were written totaling $3,725.