A New Jersey pastor has filed a lawsuit accusing Wells Fargo of erroneously linking him to a case of check forgery, an action that led to his interrogation and arrest as well as his photo being posted on a state police Facebook site.
The Rev. Jeff Edwards, who has led United Methodist Church of Parsippany for 29 years, is seeking compensatory and punitive damages as well as reimbursement of legal fees and costs, according to his suit filed in March in the Superior Court of New Jersey. The bank is trying to move the case to arbitration, according to documentation shared by Edwards.
Wells Fargo declined a request for an interview. On Friday, it offered this statement: “We apologize and regret the error that led to this situation involving Rev. Jeff Edwards. We are reviewing our procedures to ensure something similar does not happen again.” When asked if the bank disputes Edwards' version of events, a spokesman did not reply.
This is a story about an innocent person who was plunged into a legal nightmare through mistakes bank employees made, and about the dangers of relying on surveillance camera images, especially if they cannot be paired with other relevant data. And, Edwards said, it may be a story about a corporate culture in which employees are too afraid to admit they made a mistake and to fix it.
What happened
Edwards' 16-page lawsuit — which accuses state police and the bank of an "inexcusable false arrest, malicious prosecution and humiliation of an innocent man" — lays out in detail what he says happened to him and why. The account below is drawn from the suit and an interview with Edwards.
On April 16, 2018, Edwards deposited four checks into his account at a Wells Fargo branch in Parsippany.
At some point that same day at the same ATM, someone deposited four fraudulent checks into the account of a woman named Tyler Mathis, the lawsuit says. The original checks had been issued by the New Jersey Turnpike Authority, but someone created about $6,000 of fake checks from them using the same check numbers and account numbers, the suit says.
The next day, a similarly altered stolen check payable to Mathis from a different business was deposited at a Wells Fargo ATM 20 miles away in Glen Ridge. The amount on it was $1,250.
The forged signature on the Glen Ridge check matched the forged signatures in Parsippany; none of the forged signatures look like Edwards’.
Shortly after these deposits were made, the New Jersey Turnpike Authority reported to state police that it had been the victim of a crime. The police asked Wells Fargo to provide photos of the person depositing the doctored checks. Wells Fargo gave them ATM camera photos of Edwards.
On July 9, the New Jersey state police posted the photos on its Facebook page, saying the person pictured had committed check fraud and asking for the public’s help in identifying him.
That same day, two state police detectives interviewed Mathis, the owner of a debit card used to deposit all the forged checks. She told the detectives she had loaned her card to a man she knew only as “Cousin Swing,” who had told her he would deposit money in her account and they would split it. She described Cousin Swing as a “dark skinned black male,” the lawsuit says. Edwards is white.
On July 10, one of his parishioners texted Edwards to let him know that his image was on the state police Facebook page. “You have a twin,” the text said.
Edwards immediately called and emailed the detective listed in the post, saying he was fairly certain the pictures were of him but that some mistake had been made. He attached pictures of his four legitimate check deposits and his bank statement to the email.
“I conveyed my distress about the threat to my reputation as a pastor presented by posting of my pictures by the state police,” Edwards said.
Later that evening, Edwards said, he received an email from a state police detective saying he had removed the post.
“I was relieved and assumed that in providing proof of my legitimate deposits, I had demonstrated my innocence,” Edwards said.
But the nightmare was just beginning.
On July 12, the detective called to ask whether at the time of the photos, Edwards had a beard and had worn clothes similar to those in the photos. Edwards said yes.
“The detective informed me that Wells Fargo was standing by their claim that my photos identify the person who deposited the fraudulent checks," he said.
The detective also said he had sent Wells Fargo the information about Edwards’ legitimate check deposits and that it would take some time for bank officials to get back to him.
About a month passed with no word from Wells Fargo or the police. Meanwhile, three New Jersey news sites had re-posted the state police's post with Edwards' picture.
On Aug. 9, Edwards visited his local Wells Fargo branch manager, explained what had happened and asked for an explanation. She said she did not know anything about it but promised to get back to him, Edwards said. A couple of days later, she said a resolutions team was working on the matter. A week or so after that, she called him and told him he should not expect to hear back from the resolution team.
In early September, the state police asked Edwards to come to a station so they could wrap up the investigation. He went, hoping to get answers. He did not think to bring a lawyer.
When he arrived, he was taken by two detectives into a small interrogation room. They laid out the pictures of him at the ATM with handwritten check numbers on them.
“They asked me if these were my pictures and I replied that I was 99.9% sure that they were,” Edwards said. “They proceeded to tell me that these pictures proved that I was guilty and pressured me to confess. I was dumbfounded. I insisted that Wells Fargo had made some kind of technology error.”
One of the detectives said: “Suppose this goes to trial and we get the Wells Fargo technology expert on the stand and he says you did it. Who do you think they’ll believe?”
They arrested him for third-degree forgery, a crime punishable by three to five years in prison and a fine of up to $15,000.
He asked the police how his legitimate check deposits lined up chronologically with the fraudulent check deposits. They said they did not know, he said. They took Edwards to another room to fingerprint him and take his mugshots.
But he had piqued their interest. One of the detectives asked him if he could log on to his bank account and bring up pictures of his deposited checks and see if they included timestamps. Edwards went to a computer and accessed the check images, but they lacked timestamps. The detectives then allowed Edwards to call Wells Fargo customer service to see if they could provide the time of deposit. The service representative said that information was not available to him but that he would get an answer back to Edwards within five days.
Edwards said he did not hear anything. A week later, he called customer service again and was told that the inquiry had been closed because the ATM he used did not maintain data beyond two weeks.
Edwards hired a lawyer. He was summoned to court three times. The third time, on Jan. 16, 2019, the judge dismissed the charges as a result of the state’s failure to adhere to the court’s orders to produce discovery and evidence.
Red flags, errors
Mistakes get made, and Edwards acknowledges that. But in this case, there were many red flags that should have tipped off Wells Fargo and the police that they had the wrong person.
First, there's Tyler Mathis’ description of her co-conspirator as dark skinned. Second, Mathis’ debit card was used to deposit similar forged checks the following day at a branch Edwards had not visited. Third, the signatures on the forged checks matched each other but did not match Edwards’ signature. And fourth, the man Wells Fargo photographed depositing the fifth check at Glen Ridge was not Edwards, according to the lawsuit.
Moroever, Edwards and his church have been using the Parsippany Wells Fargo branch for decades. It would make no sense for him to deposit forged checks there.
When the police asked Wells Fargo to provide them with Edwards’ ATM pictures imprinted with the corresponding fraudulent check numbers, the bank said it could not provide that, the lawsuit said. It said it had inherited the ATM with its acquisition of Wachovia and that the machine could not print check numbers.
A Wells Fargo employee offered to write check numbers by hand on the photos of Edwards. Two of the photos had different check numbers on them but the exact same timestamp, to the second — an impossibility given that no one can deposit two checks that quickly. The other check numbers were out of sequence.
“Wells Fargo could not help but know that in providing this information they were providing evidence that would lead to somebody’s arrest," Edwards said. "That they would be that careless and have so little disregard for that possibility is kind of shocking.”
Edwards said this is a case of “extraordinary sloppiness” on Wells Fargo’s part, but also something more: “There’s a culture where they are loath to acknowledge mistakes,” he said.
“It would have been a simple enough thing for them to say, ‘We no longer have the capacity to reassess what we said two months earlier and we’re really not sure,’ ” he said. “But instead they stood by their initial determination, which is appalling.”
Status of the case
Edwards said he has not received a direct apology from either Wells Fargo or the state police. Last he checked, the Facebook postings with his pictures on them were still online.
“As a pastor, the foundation of my vocation is in people's perception of me as being trustworthy,” he said. “Their reckless charges against me threatened my hard-earned reputation as somebody worthy of people's trust.”
The suit, a civil claim filed in the Morris County division, is pending. The bank is claiming that an agreement Edwards signed when he first opened an account with Wachovia states that disputes would go to arbitration rather than to court.
