‘You feel violated,’ customer has $5,000 vanish from account days before Christmas – getting it back was ‘an ordeal’

ONE woman’s Christmas has turned Grinch-like after thousands of dollars disappeared from her bank account ahead of the holiday.

Carole Wesolowski found out about her misfortune when she received a letter from her bank notifying her that a recently cashed check had bounced due to fraud.

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That would be a concerning message for anyone, but it is ten-fold more so when Carole had never written nor cashed such a check.

“That was the first I’d ever seen this check when I got it in the mail,” she told ABC news affiliate WVTG.

As it turns out another woman had assumed her identity and cashed a check for $5,000 out of Carole’s account; it was all caught on bank security film.

“They have her on-camera, cashing this check, she also has a fake ID with my information on it but her picture and she took $5,000 out of our checking account,” she explained.

The unlucky victim believes that the fraud was carried out using a check her husband had mailed previously.

Carole has hypothesized that the check was stolen out of a drive-by mail dropbox and then rewritten to a larger amount so that the perpetrator could turn it into cash.

She fears that the check is not the end, holding that the woman may have stolen her identity and not just fraudulently cashed the check.

“Once they get your check, they’ve your name, they’ve got your address, and then they’ve got your checking account information on the bottom,” she said.

“And they can get so much more information on you.”

With the incident occurring just five days before Christmas, Carole was under pressure to resolve the stolen money quickly.

After filing a police report and discussing the matter with her bank, Carole was able to recover the full $5,000 that had been stolen.

But the process was not without emotional turmoil.

“For the first few days, you feel very violated,” she confided.

Carole described the process of fighting for her money back as a whole ordeal.

Since the incident, she and her husband have followed a few new precautionary measures to avoid identity theft.

First, Carole said that she only will write checks in Sharpie or a permanent pen so it is more difficult for potential fraudsters to wash it and re-fill it out.

They also will only be handing mail that contains payments directly to a postal worker rather than using a drop box.

The couple has also stopped putting their whole address on their checks, opting for just providing their names.