I asked the man to read me the business name attached to the email address. He said it was a company in Blackshear, owned by a woman whose name I recognized from our bingo sign-in sheets. She had been coming to the VFW every other Saturday for almost three years, always sitting near the kitchen and leaving before the final count. I asked whether she’d ever been authorized to handle our license. He said there was no authorization on file, but the portal showed that she had submitted eleven reports using my credentials. The first report was filed the week after she started attending bingo. I asked him to pull the IP addresses from the submissions, and he said most came from the business in Blackshear.
I drove there Monday with copies of our actual count sheets. The woman at the desk recognized me immediately and said, “I was wondering when you’d come.” I asked why she was filing gambling reports under my name. She said she wasn’t the one doing it and called her manager. The manager brought out their records and showed me invoices for “charitable gaming consulting” paid by the VFW. There were payments going back three years, all supposedly authorized by me. I had never seen a single invoice. Then I noticed the signature on the oldest one. It wasn’t mine, but it was close enough that someone had clearly copied it. I asked who received the money, and the manager pointed to a bank account. The account wasn’t the company’s. It was in the name of one of the two people who counted bingo money with me every Saturday.
I called the state before confronting him and asked them to freeze the filings. The investigator said there was already a complaint attached to my license — filed by the same email address — claiming I had been diverting charitable proceeds. I told her that was exactly what someone was trying to make it look like. She asked me to come in with every original count sheet. When I arrived, she spread them across a table beside the state filings. The numbers had been changed after our signatures were added: nine hundred dollars became four thousand, and the difference appeared as “administrative expenses.” Then she opened the oldest filing and pointed to the preparer’s digital signature. It belonged to the person who had been counting the cash beside me every Saturday since 2011 — and he’d been using my credentials to report money we never collected.
