A 26-year-old man is facing more than a dozen criminal charges in a Dacono case after police say he stole someone’s identity to open up a bank account and stole multiple checks.
The allegations start Dec. 11, when police say 26-year-old Zachariah Huss impersonated a man using the victim’s state-issued ID and opened up an account at a bank in the 5800 block of Firestone Boulevard in Firestone. Video from the bank showed Huss interacting with the teller.
Sometime before Jan. 9, a Brighton resident had an insurance check mailed to her that went missing. A nearby neighbor reported his driver’s license was also missing from the mail. On Jan. 9, Huss used an ATM to try endorsing the insurance check to the fraudulent bank account, according to records. The check was worth more than $1,800. The bank blocked the transaction. Surveillance video, as well as GPS data from an ankle monitor Huss was wearing, confirmed it was Huss who used the ATM, records state.
Huss was on parole with the Colorado Department of Corrections following convictions in four cases in Adams and Weld counties.
On Jan. 11, residential surveillance video showed Huss stealing mail from a home in the 1200 block of MacKenzie Court in Dacono. A $352 check was taken from the mailbox. That same day, Huss deposited the check into his fraudulent account, according to records. But the check was altered to a numerical value of $3,520 with a written value of “three thousand and fifty-two dollars.”
Later that day, Huss residential surveillance video showed Huss stealing mail from a home in the 1200 block of MacDougal Court in Dacono. He took three checks, totaling $280, according to records. The following morning, Huss deposited the check into his fraudulent account, altering the amount of one of the $100 checks to $1,000.
On Jan. 22, Huss tried cashing a $615 check from another victim who said she never wrote the check, claiming to be the man whose driver’s license was stolen earlier that month. The woman said she ordered checks through the mail, but she never received them. Huss presented the license as he tried to cash the check, records show.
On Jan. 28, Broomfield police notified Dacono police of a stolen vehicle. The man whose license Huss had presented less than a week earlier was one of the owners of the vehicle. Records state the vehicle was stolen from a dealership while Huss was impersonating the owner.
On Jan. 29, Huss arrived to a scheduled meeting with his parole officer in Fort Collins. He arrived in the stolen vehicle. Police searched the car and found 11 checks with a total value of more than $55,000. Additional checks, checkbooks, credit cards and ID cards were also found, according to records. A box for software to print checks was also located.
Other items of evidence included handwritten notes with bank account numbers, routing numbers and passwords.
Huss admitted to being involved in many of the events police accused him of, records state, but said he was working for the victim whose name he used to open up the fraudulent account. He said he was being paid $100 per day for his actions and that the man who hired him left the forgery-related items in the stolen vehicle he drove to the parole hearing. Police noted Huss was “deceptive” multiple times throughout his interview.
Dacono police arrested Huss on Jan. 29. He remains at the Weld County Jail as of Tuesday afternoon. He’s facing 15 charges in Weld County, including seven counts of identity theft, one count of criminal possession of a financial device with more than four different names, four counts of forgery, two counts of criminal impersonation and one count of criminal possession of ID documents with multiple victims.
Huss has a disposition hearing 10:30 a.m. March 9 before Weld District Judge Julie Hoskins.
