Former Wal-Mart employee accused of check fraud

A former Spring Wal-Mart employee is behind bars, accused of leading a check-fraud scheme that apparently cost shoppers thousands of dollars — and it all goes back to store employees failing to give customers their checks back.

Wal-Mart is one of those stores that uses electronic scanners to process checks, so checks are supposed to be scanned and then handed back to customers. But police say Dazzie Mingo — who, by the way, Houstonist would nominate for Name of the Year if we knew how — would scan checks, then keep them and have them rescanned over and over, increasing the checks' amounts each time. So customers like Pam Davis ended up having far more than they knew withdrawn from their bank accounts — in Davis's case, Wal-Mart employees ran a check originally mad out for $37 five times. "Five times, they changed the amounts each time," she told KTRK. "It was almost $3,000." Officials say Mingo would give the checks she kept to other people, who would use them for Wal-Mart shopping sprees.

Harris County Precinct 4 Capt. Mark Herman said four victims have been identified in the check scheme and police are trying to figure out who others might be. But the victims might have a frustrating road ahead: Davis said she didn't discover the fraud until more than 30 days after it happened, and because of that, neither the bank nor Wal-Mart plans to reimburse her. It'll take a lot of price rollbacks to make up for that missing three grand ...