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DAZE WORK: Out-thinking the criminal mind more or Les
Years ago, Walmart and Sam’s Club strangely started swiping your cash register receipt with a yellow highlighter as you left the building.
No way were they matching what you bought with what was on the receipt. It never seemed like they were even counting purchases and checking for the right number.
Turns out that all began in reaction to a clever criminal endeavor in which big-ticket electronics were being stolen and returned for cash at other stores.
As explained to me by a veteran trooper at Putnamville, thieves would buy a TV or VCR (expensive in those days), go through the checkout and deposit the merchandise in a waiting pickup or car which would immediately leave the premises. The thief would then return to the store with the same receipt in hand, picking up another TV or VCR and walking out with it.
Thieves would steal items here and return them for cash at Plainfield or Martinsville or some other nearby Walmart at the time. I remember hearing the loss amounted to thousands of dollars before the criminal mind was thwarted.
Marking the receipt made it ineligible for a return engagement at the checkout.
It’s amazing how many ways the criminal element can concoct to circumvent the law.
The latest is a scam in which jail inmates have been collecting unemployment benefits while otherwise incarcerated. It’s a ploy that started in the prisons and has been spreading to county jails, Putnam included. Local authorities earlier this week filed theft and fraud charges on 19 Putnam County Jail inmates totaling $113,000.
Local officials learned of the illegal activity thanks to Putnam County native Les McFarland, a 28-year veteran of the Marshall County Sheriff’s Department and nephew of late Commissioner Gene McFarland and wife Betty.
And McFarland was happy to help.
“I’m a Bainbridge boy,” he said via telephone. “My heart is still in Putnam County. We own the family farm just outside Putnam County.”
A North Putnam High School grad whose family moved north in the 1980s, McFarland did 14 years undercover in the Marshall County Department and it was during his work in law enforcement that he became aware of the unemployment scam.
Indiana State Police officers shared with him how inmates in state prisons were applying for unemployment benefits and having someone on the outside file their weekly vouchers with the Indiana Department of Workforce Development. Benefits would then be deposited in the account of a relative or significant other while the inmate continued behind bars.
McFarland wondered how Marshall County might be affected and initially found 10 offending inmates there in his county, filing welfare fraud charges against 20 individuals -- both the person in jail and the one on the outside enabling them.
The last time, the booty was more than $200,000, McFarland said. And he’s in the process of filing on 28 more individuals for “several hundred thousand dollars” in ill-gotten gain.
“I worked one case on a guy from Peru who was found with meth on a traffic stop,” McFarland recalled. “His girlfriend did the weekly vouchers and the money was forwarded to a multi-million-dollar home in California.”
In another case, a woman’s husband was in the jail and she was doing the paperwork on the outside.
“She was making more in a month than I was making working fulltime,” McFarland said, sounding none too happy about it.
Having turned Putnam officials onto the scam and shared his contact investigator in Indiana Workforce Development, McFarland was thrilled to hear the county had filed on 19 inmates.
However, he said they could have gone for 38, charging both the incarcerated individual and his or her outside source.
“It’s fraud either way,” McFarland said, noting the disclaimer when a person signs onto the Workforce Development website notes that persons incarcerated or hospitalized are not eligible for unemployment benefits.
Filing by computer is what has really driven the scam potential, McFarland said, nothing that “COVID drove a whole lot of it” because claimants “weren’t going in and meeting with people face to face.”
McFarland said he’s tried to imagine the bigger picture, noting that the loss here in a rural county like Putnam was $113,000.
“Think about what’s happening in Indianapolis or other counties,” he said. “You know it’s going on in other jails. It’s happening in the prisons.”
Just another chapter in policing the criminal mind.