Woman charged in check scheme

A check kiting scheme targeting two local banks has thousands of dollars worth of hot checks bouncing around the county and has left the check writer facing a mountain of charges.

The alleged passer of the checks, Alicia Kay Hernandez, 26, is presently charged with passing four worthless checks. However, according to sheriff?s investigator Jim Hartman, there are at least 36 hot checks lawmen already know about and perhaps others circulating the area.

?Anyone who took a check from this woman drawn on either U.S. Bank or Beacon Federal needs to contact me so we can finish preparing our case and make sure we?ve found all the victims,? Hartman said. ?We think we already know most of the victims but there could be others.?

Hartman said Hernandez committed a classic check kiting scheme where she opened a new account, wrote checks on that account and then fed the new account with worthless checks from another bank account which was also close to empty. The idea is to keep the paperwork going back and forth as long as possible to avoid the banks and sellers from discovering there are insufficient funds.

Hernandez reportedly accomplished the feat, at least temporarily, by opening an account with Beacon Federal with an initial deposit of $11. She then went about writing at least 36 worthless checks totaling over $6,000. Once the checks were found to be worthless, resulting in service fees from Beacon totaling $1,191 at $29 per hot check, Hernandez then doubled her trouble by writing checks on her U.S. Bank account to pay the Beacon service fees.

She went on to overpay Beacon using the worthless U.S. Bank checks reportedly hoping she would be able to cover the hot checks which were still streaming into Beacon from various local merchants. In all, Hernandez owes U.S. Bank over $6,000, meaning she will face charges for combined thefts upwards of $12,000.

Additional victims of Hernandez may call Hartman at 473-8738.