Chase Matthew Griffin was sentenced Thursday to nine years in prison for helping drive a $2.8 million bank fraud scheme that used stolen mail checks, fake deposits and fast withdrawals to drain accounts before the bank could catch on. U.S. District Judge Josephine L. Staton also ordered Griffin to pay $307,386 in restitution.
Griffin, 26, had already pleaded guilty in March in downtown Los Angeles to one federal count of conspiracy to commit bank fraud. Prosecutors said he recruited accomplices online, often through Instagram, posting photographs of himself holding stacks of currency more than one foot high and advertising for people willing to let him use their bank accounts.
Once Griffin found someone willing to help, he and others deposited fraudulent checks into that account and rushed to pull the money out before the bank detected the fraud. The scheme depended on speed and repetition. It also depended on stolen mail, with altered or counterfeit checks used to make the money look legitimate long enough to move it.
One of the clearest examples came in December 2023, when a North Hollywood business reported that it had mailed three checks totaling nearly $84,490 from a U.S. Postal Service collection box in Tarzana. The checks were stolen and later deposited into JPMorgan Chase accounts that did not belong to the intended recipients. A law enforcement review of one Chase account found a prior deposit of about $22,487 made at an ATM in Upland, and investigators said another check for nearly $29,081 had been copied into a counterfeit version using the same date, check number and amount, but a different payee.
The money moved quickly after that, with withdrawals used for ATM cash, Zelle and CashApp payments, a plane ticket and card purchases at a Southern California casino. That speed is what made the case work and what made it hard to stop: by the time a bank flags a bad check, the cash is often already gone.
Griffin’s sentence closes his part of the case, but it does not answer what became of the other people drawn into the scheme. That gap matters because the fraud was built as a network, not a solo act, and the nine-year term now stands as the public punishment while the rest of the cast remains unaccounted for in the record disclosed Thursday.
