The woman across the desk was the same office manager who had told me four years of my payments had gone to a closed account. I asked her to pull the images for all forty-eight checks, not just the four she’d looked at. She did, and the pattern was there immediately. Every check had my name, address, and lot number exactly as I’d written them, but across the bottom someone had drawn a line through my lot number and written another number above it in blue ink. Same handwriting. Same pen. Same place on every check. I asked her whether those changes were made before the checks were deposited or after, and she said the bank’s processing images showed they had been altered before the payments were posted. Then she turned one of the checks toward me and pointed to the endorsement on the back. It wasn’t the association’s endorsement. It was a stamp with the name of a person I’d never heard of.
I asked why someone would go through nineteen years of my checks just to redirect four years of them, and the manager said she didn’t know. So I asked her to pull the account history for the account that had received my money. She said she couldn’t because it had been closed, but she could see the old transaction records. The account had belonged to another homeowner who sold her house in 2021. That explained the wrong lot number, but it didn’t explain why my checks kept getting changed after that homeowner had already moved away. Then the manager noticed something in the transaction notes. The same employee had manually corrected every one of my payments. She called over a senior clerk, and he looked at the screen for a long time before saying those corrections shouldn’t have been possible without a supervisor’s authorization. I asked who the supervisor was. He read the name from the system, and it was the same woman sitting across from me.
She immediately said she hadn’t made the changes and that someone must have been using her credentials. I asked whether the system kept login records, and the senior clerk said it did. He pulled them up and found forty-eight entries, all made from the same terminal, usually within an hour of my checks being processed. Then he opened the employee access history. The terminal belonged to the association’s office, but the login wasn’t hers. It belonged to an employee who had left the company three years earlier. The senior clerk said that account should have been disabled when she quit. I asked him to check when it was last used, and he looked at the date and stopped talking. The login had been active yesterday morning — and the person who had signed into it was the association’s current president.
