Authorities are still trying to find out who hacked into the bank account in which Leflore County had been depositing the millions of dollars it is receiving in federal coronavirus relief.
Last month, four fraudulent checks as well as two fraudulent bank debits had been drawn on the account, according to Bill Staten, an investigator with the county Sheriff’s Department. The sum of the fraudulent activity totaled a little more than $14,000, according to Staten.
The Attorney General’s Office is assisting in the investigation.
Staten said Planters Bank, where the county account is held, had already replaced as of Monday all but a couple of hundred dollars of the stolen funds.
Typically, the depository bank replenishes the fraudulent withdrawals and then is reimbursed by the bank that cashed the bogus check or the business that accepted the bogus payment.
Staten said investigators do not know how the perpetrator or perpetrators were able to access the checking account.
Speculation has focused on a photo that Robert Collins, vice president of the county Board of Supervisors, posted to his Facebook page on Jan. 17. That photo, taken inside the Leflore County Courthouse, shows Collins holding the check for $1 million that he and other county officials would later that day present to Greenwood Leflore Hospital as emergency funding for the endangered medical facility.
The account and bank routing numbers are both clearly visible in the photo.
Collins acknowledged that the photo, which was still showing on his Facebook page as recently as Monday, might have unintentionally abetted the fraud.
“That could have been, could not been,” he said.
Even if the photo was the source of the information, that does not excuse whoever used it in a criminal way, he said. “We put checks out there all the time with numbers on it. Nobody is supposed to hack your account.”
The supervisors are expected to issue on Wednesday the second and final installment of the county’s $2.25 million commitment to the publicly owned hospital. The funds are coming out of the nearly $5.5 million the county was awarded from the American Rescue Plan Act, passed by Congress in 2021 to help the nation recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Collins said the checking account that had been hacked has been closed, and he believes a new account for the coronavirus relief fund has been opened.
- Contact Tim Kalich at 662-581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
