View this video and look at this article of a TRUSTED retired employee
and how she was treated by the law and her own former employer.
And watch this.... http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/26184891/vp/30344575#30344575
THEN PROTECT YOURSELF and your family with an Identity Theft/Legal Plan that covers both the ID Theft AND the Legal consequences you're bound to face:
Go to [copy and paste] www.prepaidlegal.com/hub/dancassin and click on family plans or call me Dan at 502-554-2397 or email dan@dancassin.com
A Strange Case of Identity Theft
Susan Sward, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Margot Somerville knew she was in for a hassle when her wallet was stolen in 2006 on a
San Francisco streetcar. But she had no way of knowing she would end up facing felony
identity-theft charges 950 miles away.
Somerville, 64, was a retired Wells Fargo Bank vice president. Her youngest son, Todd
Harris, was a nationally known Republican strategist. The entryway of her expensive
Walnut Creek home was decorated with pictures of her with former President George
H.W. Bush and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. She had never been accused of a crime in
her life.
But one Sunday morning in April 2008, nearly two years after her wallet was swiped,
police came to her house and took Somerville away in handcuffs on a no-bail warrant out
of Colorado.
Prosecutors in a town near Denver claimed she had masterminded a scam in which a
woman armed with Somerville's identification had used stolen checks and bank
withdrawal slips to steal more than $60,000 from other people's accounts at local Wells
Fargo branches. Somerville was charged with 19 felonies.
By the time the charges were dropped seven months later, Somerville said she had spent
more than $46,000 in legal bills. Even today, police in Wheat Ridge, Colo., don't think
they made a mistake by having her arrested, saying a handwriting expert said she had
written many of the forged documents.
Bank's response
Wells Fargo says it cooperated with both law enforcement and Somerville's attorney
during the investigation. The bank is happy that charges against her were dropped, a
spokesman says.
But Somerville argues that blunders made by Wells Fargo, combined with the bungling
of small-town police and prosecutors, got her wrongly indicted as the supposed kingpin
of a nationwide identify-theft and check-fraud ring. She was treated as a criminal and not
as a victim, she says.
"In my heart, I never knew anything like this could happen," Somerville said.
Her case was "the perfect storm of horror," recalled her son, Todd Harris, who has
worked for Schwarzenegger, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Arizona Sen. John McCain. "I
kept thinking sanity was going to prevail, but days turned into weeks, months and years."
Somerville's troubles began on June 7, 2006. She and seven friends from her bridgeplaying
group rode BART into the city, ate lunch at the Slanted Door at the Ferry
Building and then boarded a packed F-line streetcar to ride a few blocks down the
Embarcadero.
Pocket Picked
On the streetcar, Somerville felt someone bump up against her, and she instinctively
pulled her purse closer to her body. When she got off the streetcar, her wallet was gone.
She reported the theft of her wallet, credit cards and Wells Fargo ATM card to San
Francisco police. The thief soon charged $45 in purchases from United Parcel Service,
and initially that was all that happened.
About five months later, Somerville noticed money missing from her bank account, and
at about the same time her son noticed money gone from an account he shared with his
mother. Both said bank personnel initially downplayed their concerns about the
unauthorized withdrawals, but further checking proved that about $20,000 was missing
from the accounts.
It turned out, Somerville said, that an impostor had used blank bank withdrawal slips and
stolen checks to obtain the money out of Somerville's accounts, accessing them at a Wells
branch in Wheat Ridge, Colo., and another Denver-area branch. The thief was filmed by
a security camera, and Wheat Ridge police acknowledge that she was not Somerville,
police records show. But they apparently came to believe that Somerville and unknown
accomplices were stealing blank checks and using them to obtain fraudulent withdrawals.
When Somerville next traveled to Denver to visit family, she dropped by the Wheat
Ridge Wells Fargo branch. She said she wanted the bank to know "they had just given
money out of my account to someone who wasn't me."
The manager "got defensive and blew me off," Somerville says. The manager insisted the
bank had followed its policy for approving withdrawals: The woman claiming to be
Somerville had her driver's license and knew Somerville's Social Security number and
where she opened her bank account - two standard questions the bank uses to verify a
customer's identity. Somerville couldn't understand how the thief was able to get this
information because it was not in her wallet when it was stolen.
Rebuffed by the bank, Somerville contacted the Wheat Ridge police. Detectives
eventually concluded that she was the ringleader of an identity-theft ring.
Police Bungling
Police asked Somerville twice to provide handwriting samples, and twice she complied.
Each time, she said, police told her the results did not rule her out as a suspect. As she
later learned, a handwriting expert hired by police had concluded that Somerville had
signed some incriminating documents in the case.
Somerville said Wells officials told her that her money could not be refunded while the
case was under investigation. Finally, Somerville wrote Richard Kovacevich, then Wells
Fargo's chairman, at the bank's San Francisco headquarters, saying that the Wheat Ridge
branch "failed to follow even the most basic" of security procedures that could have
stopped her account from being looted.
She said she never received an answer. But in June 2007, Wells Fargo refunded the
$20,000 that had been stolen from her accounts. "Had I not been a (retired) trusted
employee, I never would have gotten my money back," she said.
Lie detector
Two months later, Somerville said, Wheat Ridge police called her and said that if she
didn't return to Colorado to take a lie detector test, an arrest warrant would be issued for
her. Instead, she hired a lawyer in Colorado. A prosecutor in the office of Jefferson
County District Attorney Scott Storey promised she would be notified if the case were to
go forward, but no alert was ever given, Somerville says.
The following year, Somerville answered a knock on the door on a Sunday morning and
found two Walnut Creek officers ready to arrest her. As the police moved to handcuff
her, she started crying uncontrollably.
She was transported to Martinez, where her mug shot was taken; she then was shackled to
another female prisoner and taken by bus to the county jail in Richmond. There she lay
crying on her cell bunk all night.
Somerville was released at 2 p.m. the next day. She flew to Colorado a few days later,
where she was booked and fingerprinted.
Police never made any other arrests in the case, and neither police nor prosecutors could
ever really explain how they thought the supposed fraud ring worked, said Karen
Steinhauser, one of Somerville's Colorado lawyers.
"We don't know what they were thinking - if they were thinking she planned the thefts
from her accounts to look like a victim or what," she said. "It never made sense."
The trial was postponed several times. Each time Somerville had to fly to Colorado to
appear in court. In the meantime, her attorneys had her take a lie detector test, which she
passed, and police finally tested for her fingerprints on the forged documents. They found
none.
Constant Contact
On Oct. 27, 2008 Steinhauser wrote the district attorney's office urging it to drop the charges.
The case was based "solely on handwriting analysis," she wrote, "which in this day and
age of sophisticated identity theft rings ... means absolutely nothing."
On Nov. 17, 2008 the district attorney's office dropped the case. Somerville's lawyers told the
judge that the "unfounded prosecution" had forced Somerville "to prove her innocence,
something that a defendant should not have to do in our criminal justice system."
Victims Scrutinized
Linda Sherry of the nonprofit group Consumer Action said it's not uncommon for people
who complain of identity theft to find themselves under scrutiny.
"Banks sometimes tend to want to blame the victim first," she said. "They always want to
see if someone in your family or someone with access to you committed the fraud - and a
lot of identity theft is committed by people who know the victim." Nevertheless,
Somerville's experience seems extreme, she said.
"I have never heard of a local police agency going to these lengths to blame the victim,"
she said. "It doesn't make sense that this agency would use its limited resources to build a
case against the very victim of the crime."
Pam Russell, the district attorney's spokeswoman, declined to say whether the charges
were dropped because prosecutors realized Somerville was innocent. "We are absolutely
committed to protecting the community from identity theft, and in Colorado we actually
have a high incidence of that," Russell said. "When Somerville was originally arrested, a
judge found probable cause to issue the warrant, and we initially believed there was
probable cause" to charge her. The case was dropped because "we no longer believed that
we had a successful likelihood of conviction," she said.
Wheat Ridge Police Sgt. Fred Bright said police don't owe Somerville an apology. "In
our view, the evidence still points to her because the handwriting analyst reviewing
multiple documents concluded that she had written many of them," he said. "There
clearly was a fraud occurring; we just couldn't prove in a criminal court of law who did
it."
Wells Fargo contends it helped clear Somerville's name. "We're very pleased that
information Wells Fargo provided to the authorities and to Ms. Somerville's attorney led
to the charges against her being dropped," said Chris Hammond, a Wells senior vice
president. The bank's investigation "determined Ms. Somerville was defrauded and
credited her account with the amount that had been inappropriately withdrawn," he said.
Harris, Somerville's son, is not mollified by the explanations offered by law enforcement
and the bank. He remains angry at what he sees as law enforcement's inept handling of
the case. And he says it is very hard to comprehend the conduct of Wells Fargo, which he
argues helped police pursue his mother as if she were a common criminal.
"We were a Wells Fargo family," Harris said. "I used to be a teller in high school. My
brother was a teller. One of my sisters was an assistant branch manager. We were like a
company family."
For her part, Somerville is considering whether to sue the bank, the police and the
prosecutors for all the heartache they put her through.
At the same time, she still keeps a small Wells Fargo stagecoach as a decoration in her
bookshelf, and she says: "I love Wells Fargo. I never moved my account. I spent a lot of
my life there."
How to Protect Yourself
The Federal Trade Commission has some advice for people who fall victim to identity
theft - and for those who want to avoid it entirely.
If you're a victim, take these steps, the FTC says:
-- Put a fraud alert on your credit reports by contacting the toll-free number of one of
these three consumer reporting companies : TransUnion (800) 680-7289, Equifax (800)
525-6285 or Experian (888) 397-3742.
-- Close accounts that you believe "have been tampered with or opened fraudulently."
-- File a complaint with the FTC by using its online complaint form, calling the
commission's theft hot line toll-free at (877) ID-THEFT, or writing Identity Theft
Clearinghouse, Federal Trade Commission, 600 Pennsylvania Ave., NW, Washington,
DC 20580.
-- Contact your police department and report your identity theft.
To avoid becoming an ID theft victim, the FTC gives this advice :
-- Never carry your Social Security number in your wallet.
-- Shred crucial documents such as charge receipts before throwing them into the trash.
-- When you go out, only carry the identification and credit card you will need.
-- When you select passwords for your bank and other accounts, a combination of letters,
numbers and special characters is best.
-- Never give out personal identification information on the phone unless you have
confirmed who you are talking to and you initiated the contact.
Finally, to be notified or prevent ID Theft or to deal with the legal effects of ID Theft:
PROTECT YOURSELF and your family with an Identity Theft/Legal Plan that covers both the ID Theft AND the Legal consequences you're bound to face:
Go to [copy and paste] www.prepaidlegal.com/hub/dancassin and click on family plans or call me Dan at 502-554-2397 or email dan@dancassin.com
