Bill's Fresh Market hit by $18,000 in forged checks

JONESBORO, Ark. – When the accountant looked at the books Monday for Bill’s Fresh Market, she noticed something terribly wrong.

Four unauthorized checks were written and debited from the Centennial Bank account to various businesses, according to the incident report filed with Jonesboro Police Department 4 p.m. Monday afternoon. It was not specified if the businesses were local.

The checks were written in the amount of $5606.01, $3762.19, $4348.08 and $4930.89 respectively, according to the report.

Copies of the checks were provided to Jonesboro police by management of the regional grocery chain. One of the owners, Bill Orr, said the checks were written as an HVAC company out of Kentucky and only had their account number on it.

“It’s an identity theft event,” Orr said. “The checks didn’t have our name on them anywhere but they were printed with our account number.”

Orr said there are a lot of similar situations happening to businesses presently but this is

the first time it has happened to his.

“Companies such as ours write millions of dollars of checks per month,” Orr said. “All it
takes is one dishonest person working for a vendor or other recipient of our checks to steal the routing number. It’s scary stuff.”