Five Georgia residents are behind bars after they unknowingly targeted the mailbox of the Kenner chief of police, authorities say, to steal mail as part of a check fraud scheme.

Suspicions were raised when Chief Keith Conley got a phone call on Tuesday from Shauntell Porter, an employee at a bank in New Orleans, asking him to verify whether he'd written a large check that someone had just come in to cash.

"When a customer doesn't usually write large checks like that, it raises flags for me," said Porter, a finance center supervisor who trains employees to spot fraud. "I thought, let me reach out and dig into this a little more because it didn't feel right."

Kenner police say Porter's suspicions were on the money.

Conley had indeed written a check that very morning and placed it in his

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