- December 9, 2024
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The Flagler County Sheriff’s Office has recovered a small percentage of the money that was stolen from Flagler Schools in a cybertheft scam last fall, but the FCSO has not made any arrests, a Sheriff’s spokesperson said.
The school district lost $719,583 in a fraudulent electronic money transfer last fall. The district believed it was making a payment to H.A. Contracting Corp., the contractor for the Matanzas High School expansion project.
The FCSO has recovered $19,700 of the stolen money that the Sheriff’s Office believes was sent to a money mule, Public Affairs Officer Carmen Fleischmann said in an email to the Observer.
“We were able to recover $19,700.00 from a bank account where the funds were initially sent to,” Fleischmann wrote. “The money was then disbursed to numerous other accounts that we have subpoenaed, waiting to see if there (are) any other funds we can recover. The initial funds were sent to a business account belonging to a gentleman located in California we’ve identified as a mule. No arrests have been made.”
Flagler Schools Superintendent LaShakia Moore said the district is continuing to work with its insurance company, the Sheriff’s Office and H.A. Contracting to recover more funds.
“Our sheriff's office is really actively working on this and I'm still hopeful that we'll continue to recover more more money,” Moore said. “We're still awaiting feedback from JP Morgan Chase as to the account and if there were additional fraudulent acts to that account. So we'll hope. We haven't been told that it's closed, so we're still actively working towards it.”