Police: Fayetteville woman's bogus checks topped $500K

Fayetteville, N.C. — A Fayetteville woman has been charged with participating in a multimillion-dollar fraud scheme with links to Nigeria, police said Tuesday.

Marie Elizabeth Register, 48, of 4542 Caskey Court, was charged with two counts each of obtaining property by false pretense and obtaining property greater than $100,000 by false pretenses, four counts of forgery of instrument and one count of possession of five or more counterfeit instruments.

Investigators said Register printed and mailed 235 counterfeit checks valued at more than $500,000 to people selling items on the eBay and Craigslist websites.

Register asked sellers to cash checks valued at more than what she owed, keep payment for the items purchased and send the balance back to her via Western Union or Moneygram, investigators said. She would then mail the cash to Nigeria.

Police have found 2,630 checks so far that they have linked to the scam, with a total value of $7.1 million.

Investigators are still trying to determine whether the scam has ties to terrorist activity, police said.

19 Comments

WRAL.com welcomes your comments on this story. All comments are moderated prior to publication based on our posting guidelines. Please review them prior to posting and if your message is not approved.

VIEW ALL 19 COMMENTS

This story is closed for comments. Comments on WRAL.com news stories are accepted and moderated between the hours of 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. Monday through Friday.

Latest Comments

we got two of these ourselves .they were postal money orders and they look legit.we have an online business and some guy sent us one for $400 more than his purchase with instructions to send the remainder to someone else. we knew something was fishy and sent it back along with a letter telling him we are not a bank and next time if he wanted to make a purchase use paypal

grab-a-gift.com
November 4, 2010 5:57 p.m.

I use to work at a bank and saw someone get scammed out of over 7,000 doing this. She thought she was doing "legit" work for someone. We noticed she was cashing these money orders. On the 3rd day and trying to cash another 3,000, we told her that she could not cash any more and a hold was placed on her account. Several days later all the money orders were returned because they were fake.