Bad check found on Hilton Head bridge walker, police allege
A Georgia resident who was stopped for a welfare check on the Hilton Head Island bridges was arrested after being found with an alleged counterfeit check, according to police.
David Lawrence Ivester, 67, of Forsyth, was charged April 2 with a felony count of forgery, inmate records show. Police say he admitted to taking part in a criminal scheme involving cashing fraudulent checks for an accomplice and taking a cut of the profits.
His arrest comes as personal checks continue to vanish from the mail in the Hilton Head area, with some being “washed” with fraudulent recipients and deposited into unknown accounts. It was not immediately clear if Iverson’s case was connected to this ongoing trend of cases, which involved over $15,000 being targeted in just one week earlier this year.
Suspect found with ‘suspicious’ check
A deputy offered Ivester a ride to the mainland around 10 p.m. on April 2 after seeing him walking on the wrong side of the Hilton Head bridges.
After identifying the man through his driver’s license, police saw that Ivester was listed as a person of interest in a March case where he and another suspect allegedly tried to cash counterfeit checks at banks in Bluffton and Lady’s Island, a police report says. As is standard for courtesy rides, the deputy asked Ivester to turn out his pockets before entering the vehicle. The man complied, according to the Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office incident report.
“(Ivester) seemed like he was hiding something behind his back,” sheriff’s office spokesperson Lt. Daniel Allen said. “When they looked, he had an envelope with a (company check) in it that, after further review, looked like it was forged.”
The check appeared to be made out to a local country club in the amount of $1,385.75, Ivester’s arrest warrant says. Its contents were suspicious in several ways, the responding deputy noted: It appeared to be filled out with two different fonts, the report says, and its ink was smudged in the fields for the dollar value and account number. “Most notably,” there appeared to be two different signatures written with different colors of ink.
Ivester initially avoided answering police’s questions about where he got the check, the report says, but eventually admitted that he was being paid by a man to cash fraudulent checks. He “could not recall how many fraudulent checks he had cashed” for the man, whom he met in the streets of Savannah, Ivester was documented saying in the police report.
Pulling out his phone, Ivester showed deputies a conversation with the man — whose contact was saved as “CHECK MAN” — about picking up and dropping off the checks, the report says. Ivester said he received a cut of the profits from cashing the fraudulent checks, but he did not know how his partner was obtaining the checks.
Ivester had attempted to cash the check at a Hilton Head bank earlier that day, he told police. Believing his partner had been caught, the other man drove away and abandoned him, the report says, forcing Ivester to begin walking back home across the bridges.
Allen said it was not clear if Ivester or his partner were connected to reports of checks going missing from the mail in the Hilton Head area and being washed with fraudulent recipients. As of Wednesday afternoon, Ivester was being held at the Beaufort County Detention Center on a 5,000 cash bond. No other arrests appear to have been made in the forgery case.
