Wells Fargo Bank and DeSoto police thought they caught a check forger when Randolph Shaheed walked into a bank in November and presented a check to be cashed for his new job as a mystery shopper.
The check was an obvious fake, police said, and they arrested Shaheed. He spent four days in jail and, after a Dallas grand jury indicted him, faced a felony charge for forgery that could have sent him back to prison for the rest of his life.
Shaheed, 60, is a convicted murderer who served his time for crimes committed as a gang member decades ago in Fort Worth. But he has spent the past quarter-century working to do the right thing and help ex-cons fit back into society through his prison ministry.
Two days before his arrest, he was honored by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice for his work helping ex-offenders. State officials told me he was an “ideal” ex-offender who tried to “promote positive change within our community.”
The Watchdog looked at the correspondence between Shaheed and the supposed mystery shopper company. I quickly concluded that the company was a fraud. Shaheed had been scammed, not the other way around.
But DeSoto Police Capt. Ron Smith was not so believing. He told me in December, “Don’t believe everything you hear.” He warned, “It’s not his first experience in the criminal justice system.” He added that he would be “surprised if it turned out to be a scam.”
Well, surprise!
The Dallas district attorney’s office dropped the charges against Shaheed last month. The office didn’t respond to my requests for comment, but Shaheed’s lawyer told me what happened.
“Fortunately, we had a very reasonable prosecutor who asked to see the evidence,” lawyer Valencia Bush said. “When you see all the correspondence back and forth, you can see these people are being duped.”
Bush told me she recently represented four clients who fell for the same scam and were wrongly arrested. But Shaheed’s was the most difficult to get charges dropped because of his criminal record.
“He’s a good guy that’s been doing nothing but good works in the community,” she said. “Certainly, he wasn’t about to risk his freedom for a couple of hundred bucks.”
Here’s how the scam worked: Shaheed thought he found a job on the Internet as a shopper who would test customer service at Western Union and other stores. He was sent a check for $1,950. All he had to do, he was told in written instructions, was cash the check and send $200 back to the company as a Western Union money transfer. The rest was for him to use for mystery shopping to evaluate businesses, he was told. Afterward, he would file reports about his experiences.
The scam comes in when a bank cashes a check, then later realizes it is a fake. The supposed mystery shopper had already spent the money and wired the rest to the scammers.
The shopper is responsible for the losses. But arrests for the crime are rare. Most banks know about the scam and warn off customers before it’s too late.
The Wells Fargo bank branch manager and a corporate spokeswoman both declined to answer questions about this.
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