Nine Brooklyn gang members have been indicted on charges they stole $94,000 in a bank fraud scheme that went on for nearly two years.
The men would deposit counterfeit checks and withdraw the available cash before anyone realized the checks were bad, and this went on from June 2014 to March 2016, authorities allege.
They crew used 71 bank accounts spread among Bank of America, TD Bank, Capital One and JPMorgan Chase to deposit fake checks 241 times.
The men recruited people to either open bank accounts on their behalf or hand over the information of their current accounts, figuring out that banks would allow them to withdraw the check total before it cleared when deposited into retail accounts. The banks footed the bill when they paid back the account holders for the stolen money.
Acting Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said, “We now know that gang members are increasingly using financial fraud to pay for their lifestyle – like they allegedly did in the simple yet very lucrative scheme charged in these indictments.”
Michael Morris, 21; Trumane Gibbs, 23; Darnell Brown, 24; Tevon Allen, 28; Daquan Johnson, 24; Timothy Brown, 23; Jeffrey Debrosse, 27; Julian Hubbard, 21; and Jermel Belfast, 30, face up to seven years in prison if convicted.
Johnson and Brown are members of Flatbush G-Stone Crips crew, Hubbard belongs to Folk Nation gang and Gibbs and Morris are members of a sub-gang of 8-Tray Crips, authorities said.
Five of the men were arraigned yesterday in Brooklyn Court and four of the men remain at large.