Man’s entire $400,000 savings stolen by identity thief at Atlanta bank

ATLANTA — A California man is making an attempt to determine how his whole retirement financial savings was stolen in a single fell swoop at an Atlanta financial institution.

Ira Siegelman doesn’t reside in Atlanta and has by no means even been to Atlanta. Nonetheless, somebody walked right into a Buckhead Chase financial institution with Siegelman’s IRA rollover test pretending to be him. That criminal walked out of the financial institution almost half one million {dollars} richer.

“The gross negligence is simply mind-boggling at so many ranges,” Siegelman mentioned.

Siegelman reached out from his southern California residence to Channel 2 Shopper Investigator Justin Grey after getting nowhere for greater than three weeks making an attempt to get his stolen a refund from Chase.

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Siegelman’s $400,000 IRA rollover test from a 30-year Division of Protection profession was apparently stolen from the mail and cashed on the Peachtree Street Chase department.

Siegelman says he was by no means contacted by Chase. He solely came upon what had occurred when he referred to as the U.S. Treasury questioning the place the cash was and was advised he cashed the test in Atlanta.

“Chase Financial institution by no means contacted me. Clearly, they by no means did the due diligence as a result of the test wasn’t even made out to me. It was made to Vanguard Investments,” Siegelman mentioned.

Not solely was the test made out to Vanguard, however the thief even misspelled Siegelman’s title when endorsing it.

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Chase additionally allowed the criminal to open two checking accounts in Siegelman’s title and write $25,000 value of checks.

“I checked with Chase and to be able to open a checking account you want two types of ID and a social safety quantity. They didn’t have any data aside from what was printed on the test, which is simply my title and handle,” Siegelman mentioned.

Grey reached out to Chase Financial institution who is not going to touch upon the fraud or what went flawed with safety measures.

They did launch an announcement that learn:

“We’re reaching out to the U.S. Treasury Division to allow them to file a fraud report with us. That may permit us to ship the $400,000 again to them they usually can reissue the test to Mr. Siegelman or ship him the cash electronically.”

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