Atlanta-area rapper gets 6 years in $6.5 million check fraud scheme
A Stone Mountain man is headed to federal prison after prosecutors said he not only altered checks he stole from the mail, but taught other people how to do it, too.
Authorities said 34-year-old Shamarri Tache Brooks and the people who followed his fraud tutorials stole a combined $6.5 million in checks, many of which investigators found inside his home. Brooks performed as a rapper under the name Juney Knotzz, according to federal prosecutors.
The scheme apparently didn’t actually work, in that Brooks was unable to successfully pass the checks as legitimate and get funds out of the victims’ accounts, according to U.S. Attorney Theodore Hertzberg.
“Thankfully, Brooks’s ineptitude matched his boldness,” Hertzberg said in a statement on Monday. “Although Brooks sought to teach his followers how to commit fraud, the real lesson here is that crime does not pay. We will catch you, and you will go to prison — even if your scheme is unsuccessful.”
From as early as 2022, Brooks had been taking checks out of the mail and altering them, prosecutors said.
According to the indictment, Brooks used social media platforms to reach out to people and asked them to use their bank accounts as depositories for stolen checks.
He would then alter the stolen checks to list the alleged cooperators as the intended payees, prosecutors said.
Brooks and at least one associate would deposit the checks at ATMs throughout North Georgia, according to prosecutors. While depositing the checks, they wore balaclava-style masks with a logo that said “No Free Sauce,” according to the indictment. And Brooks would sometimes post copies of the ATM deposit receipts on his social media accounts, prosecutors said.
Brooks also promoted and sold tutorials of his methods for different types of financial fraud in a collection he called his “Sauce Book,” prosecutors said.
He sold images of stolen checks that customers could purchase independently or with a copy of the tutorial manual.
Brooks was sentenced to six years after pleading guilty to bank fraud and aggravated identity theft, Hertzberg said. The prison time will be followed by five years of supervised release, according to the sentence.