I’m wondering if this was simply just a way to spend hide money to make money. A PR stunt. Hide a week’s donations, cry about godless thieves stealing money from the pious. Watch as the flock digs even deeper into their purses. Make more money than what was “lost.” And then go back to destroy the checks and pocket the cash at some later point in time.
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The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away…
Or something.
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I’d look at the person making up the bank deposit. They would be the last person to lay eyes on the cash/cheque mix. Cash donors likely don’t want a receipt while cheque donors might, or instead they have their paid cheques returned. The perp stashes the cheques uncashed. Then next day or weeks, packages up the next bank deposits, takes out the cash, substitutes a bunch of cheques brought out from the stash and makes the deposit. So the ongoing tithe revenue looks normal, but the stolen cheques are laundered right in front of everyone over a few weeks. It would take an on-the-ball donor to wonder about the delay in the cheque negotiating, but it might be the same staffer who answers the query and could cover their tracks. The timing difference throws everyone off by focusing attention on the initial theft when instead the real fraud occurred after the fact. So those booklets where you record your deposit and the bank stamps it to make it official? The tellers just wallop it without looking at them. So they show the proper cash/cheque mix but the actual deposit is mostly cheques.
Just so you know, this wasn’t me. I’m neither smart nor ballsy enough to pull this off.
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And in response to that episode, perhaps the only truly funny piece the Babylon Bee ever did:
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Hey, great news! Joel is half way to buying that Maybach 62s Landaulet he’s been lusting after (in a totally chaste way of course).
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What makes you think it’s one week’s take? That’s what was found. At some point, Osteen’s going to need go money. He’s just too slimy to be completely legit. Tuck one week here, tuck another there, and pretty soon you’ve got walking money if it all falls down.
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It seems inconvenient to need a sledge hammer to get at your go money.
Osteen (or any fictional HBO prosperity gospel preacher) doesn’t need this amateur crap for his go money. He can afford accountants. He can have as many emergency accounts as he wants in as many countries as he wants. He could put $100K and a bunch of fake IDs in safe deposit boxes in banks in every state in the US and Mexico and every province in Canada.
I get it, everybody thinks he’s a crook. But in the US, his grift is perfectly legal and he doesn’t benefit from doing something weird with the money in the collection plate that people are just giving him tax free.
He may very well be invested in something crooked. But he’s got lawyers and accountants and they’re going to hide his crooked investments with shell corporations and offshore accounts and bullshit like that.
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Thanks for the info. Clearly, American banking is VERY different from over here.
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I wonder how many caught the reference. But nicely done, nevertheless.
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“And the words of the prophets–er, profits–were hidden in the bathroom walls.”
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It might make sense if this was a stash of “emergency bug-out money in case the Feds find out what you’re up to and you have to get outta Dodge in a hurry.”
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I wonder if a particular number of checks bounce every week. So if they need all the money at the same time to cover some expense, they get ‘robbed’ and the insurance company covers the full amount of the checks?
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Seems to me to be a handy way to have a slush fund - you can’t really spend the cash openly, nor can you store it anywhere that it wouldn’t get exposed by disgruntled employees or found in a search by law enforcement. The money was reported stolen and written off. The checks were in there as a smoke screen (“see, thieves took their whole take and hid it”) to cover for it being an inside job, and if they were found, would be then reported to the insurers.
Not likely that thieves would have done this, though it’s kind of conspicuous to leave a megachurch with a duffel bag brimming with cash and checks, a big enough group of theives would find it easier to sneak the loot out in their clothing than to hide it in a wall.
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Can’t you just stop there and not use paper at all?
Genuine question, can you not pay your bills online from your app? We had cheques as recently as about ten years ago but I haven’t seen one in a long time.
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For a second there, I thought you were talking about the bathroom.
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Bidet all the way in Yurp!
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Agreed. He can’t be blamed for robbing Joel to pay Justin.
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I really don’t understand all the conspiracy theories here. As plenty of others said, the church doesn’t need to commit insurance fraud to make a couple hundred thousand. They just ask for it and the flock gives it. And Osteen himself has a million places to hide “go money” that are more legal and more accessible than the bathroom wall inside the church. In addition to the safe deposit boxes and opaque investments that @anonotwit mentioned, there are probably a lot more accessible hiding spots in his $10.5MM house (I mean, parsonage), or his other $2.9MM house. Plus the checks (which are presumably a significant share of the $600k) are largely worthless as they’ll mostly be stopped once people here that the collections were stolen.
This was almost certainly a classic crime of opportunity. Some low level staffer or volunteer found himself or herself (the gender of the bathroom will probably tell us which, since I don’t believe this is a trans-friendly congregation) alone with a pile of collection envelopes, swiped them and went into a bathroom so they could think behind a closed stall door and nobody would ask what they were doing. While there, they figured out a way to push the money into the wall. Maybe they planned to come back for it later once they figured out how to retrieve it. Or maybe they had second thoughts about stealing from a church and just decided to dump their loot (no matter how grifty the church is, the people who work/volunteer there probably believe that Jesus frowns on theft). But I’d be willing to wager that there is some sort of vent or other opening in that wall through which envelopes can be pushed.
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Even for outsiders this still makes sense. It’s not a good idea to be caught near the scene of the crime with proceeds so this won’t be the first time someone has stashed them with the aim of picking them up later.
It doesn’t even have to be this though. There’s no particular reason to assume anybody was going back for it. We don’t know how much was recovered, even less what proportion is cash. If it was connected to the original robbery it would be a fallacy to assume the amount stolen has anything to do with the amount they got away with. If someone 600k and say there was 100k in neat bundles of high denominational notes and a bunch of envelopes it makes sense to take the portable cash and inconspicuously ditch the rest at the first opportunity to maximize the opportunities to get away.
All of this of this is wild speculation, and much of clearly based on zero relevant knowledge or experience, but people still seem confident about their opinions. Something about the subject seems to encourage free range for this, that might not be extended to other areas. Largely harmless here, but it’s always a little amusing, when it’s not worrying, that no one seems to stop to consider that this gap might just be what someone with less than honest motivation relies on.
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