At Monday’s press conference about the proposed city income tax hike, Athens City Auditor Kathy Hecht addressed a question about the city’s loss of $722,000 in a phishing scam. After noting that such crimes are all too common, Hecht leveled an extraordinary claim:
We got delayed in our initial efforts to find out what happened … by information leaked that ended up in the newspaper. Well, when that happens right away — well, it’s actually not the paper, it was the online media — that really set us back as far as our ability, because that’s a big old flashing light to the people who did it, say, ‘Oh, hey, let’s grab that money and get out of here,’ kind of thing. And it just made it all that much harder.
It’s not clear if Hecht was referring to the Independent, which is digital only, or WOUB, which posts news on its website and broadcasts on radio and television. The city has a bone to pick with the Independent in all this though: We sued the city after they (we believe) unlawfully withheld public records related to the theft.
Whether Hecht was referring to the Independent or WOUB, what she said is untrue.
A leak implies that someone shared information that was not intended to be made public. That’s not what happened.
The city made the theft public information when it filed a “Complaint for Unjust Enrichment, Expedited Accounting and Injunctive Relief” against the unidentified thieves in Athens County Common Pleas Court on Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2024.
Court filings are public records that anyone can find online. You can look it up: Search for case number 24CI0321. If someone let us know that the case had been filed, that’s not a leak. That’s a news tip, and we get them all the time. In fact, it’s how a lot of our biggest stories start.
WOUB published a story about the suit on Dec. 4; we published ours the following day. The information in both stories came from the court filing.
That information included the revelation that the thieves directed the city’s fraudulent transfer to an account at Republic Bank. On Jan. 10, Republic filed a motion to intervene in the case because the same account was used for a similar scam pulled on Regency Centers, a Florida-based property developer.
According to Republic’s filing, the thieves’ account used prepaid debit cards issued by NetSpend. Republic says it contacted NetSpend “after being notified of the respective attacks. NetSpend subsequently recovered $349,522.10 of the stolen funds.”
City emails show that they discovered the fraud on Nov. 25, 2024, almost 10 days before it filed its lawsuit. If Republic Bank notified NetSpend as soon as they heard about the scam — and NetSpend was able to recover only $350,000 out of what was undoubtedly a much larger sum — it’s likely that the thieves had absconded with quite a bit of money long before either we or WOUB posted a word.
Journalists make perfect scapegoats. We shine a light on what lurks in the dark and are scorned for holding the flashlight. It is more comforting to believe that we’re out to get someone, or just making things up, than to confront the ugly truths we reveal.
And it is wonderfully convenient for officials to point the finger at us rather than own up to their own failures.
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