Eight people have been indicted in St. Louis on allegations that they deposited U.S. Treasury checks with a combined value of $3.4 million that had been stolen from the mail, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Missouri. Prosecutors say two of the defendants, Samuel Stewart and Royce Finger, recruited homeless people to carry out the deposits and coached them before taking them into banks.
All eight defendants have appeared in court and pleaded not guilty, the office said in its September 24 announcement. An indictment is a formal accusation, not a finding of guilt, and the allegations below are the government’s account of the case.
What mailed checks are exposed to between the Treasury and the mailbox
People who still receive paper payments from the federal government, whether a tax refund, a benefit payment or another disbursement, are the ones with the most at stake in a case like this. A check that is stolen from a mailbox or a mail stream has already left the agency’s hands. The payee finds out only when the payment does not arrive, or when the agency reports that it was cashed.
The practical question for those households is how to keep a payment from leaving through a mail slot at all. A reader who gets a federal payment by check has two things to settle: whether the payment can be moved to a bank account by direct deposit, and what to do the moment a payment is late. The questions are separate, and the first one removes most of the exposure that the second one has to clean up…