I was very much an opportunist. I mean I didn’t really sit there and premeditate these things. I didn’t have a genius mind and say, ‘I’ll do this’, but things would come to me and I went into a bank to open a cheque account with $100 which was all I had, with the contention that the bank would then print me cheques, and I had this phoney identification that I could go out and pass these cheques. So I walked in and opened the account. But when the New Accounts person came back, they said, ‘Here’s your temporary cheques, and we’ll be mailing you your printed cheques in about ten days.’ And because I was young, I was inquisitive. I said, ‘Well what about deposit slips?’ and she said, ‘No, they come from the cheque print, and they’ll be with your cheque book. But in the meantime, if you need to make a deposit, you can just go over to the table in the lobby of the bank, take a blank deposit slip, write your account number in, and just use that number until you get your printed ones.’ So I walked over and I took a big stack of them off the shelf, and I went back to my hotel, but I couldn’t sleep; I kept staring at them, and I thought to myself, ‘I wonder’. So I bought some magnetic ink, the ink that banks use to encode numbers on account numbers and cheques, and I encoded my account number that the bank had assigned to me the day before. I then went back to the bank and put this stack onto the shelf in the bank, and everyone who came in, put their cheque right in my bank account. |