Convicted con artist headed to prison
Convicted South Side con man Frederick H. Banks, who has filed so many fake lawsuits across the nation that he has been labeled a nuisance, is headed to federal prison for trying to rip off the online foreign exchange company Forex.
U.S. District Judge Mark Hornak, himself a target of Banks’ many lawsuits and bizarre court motions, imposed a term of 104 months for wire fraud and aggravated identity theft.
A jury convicted Banks, 52, last year.
The U.S. attorney’s office had also charged him with stalking an FBI agent and filing a fake court motion on behalf of a local woman who drowned her children, but prosecutors dropped those counts following the fraud conviction.
Banks, a repeat felon, has a long history of filing bogus court documents, sometimes including crude drawings, and so many meritless lawsuits that he has been designated as a “vexatious litigant” by the federal court system.
Among his most memorable fake filings was a 2014 motion in federal court in Manhattan to dismiss charges against Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff. Locally, he interjected himself into the case of Laurel Schlemmer of McCandless, who is in prison for drowning her children. Before she was convicted, prosecutors said he filed a motion in federal court on her behalf in 2015 in which he posed as her “legal assistant” and alleged that the CIA had commanded her to kill the children.
Banks has long contended that the CIA is controlling his thoughts.
At the point of the Schlemmer filing, he was already charged with interstate stalking in 2015 as part of a revenge plot against the FBI agent who helped put him in prison for fraud 10 years earlier.
A grand jury said he placed an ad on Craigslist seeking sex, then listed the name and phone number of the agent, saying he and his wife were looking for sexual trysts with people in the Tampa, Fla., area. The agent lives in Tampa but had been assigned to the Pittsburgh office during the original Banks investigation.
That earlier case involved another fraud in which Banks sold fake Microsoft software.
He was convicted a second time of trying to buy coins, software and other items online by lying about his identity and passing bad checks.
He got out of federal prison in 2013 but went right back after violating probation by committing yet another online scam.
In the most recent case, he used the identity of a former friend in 2013 to submit false account applications to Forex in an effort to siphon
off money from the company and into his own pre-existing bank accounts.
Judge Hornak said Banks had lied during his trial when he said a recorded voice in communicating with Forex to make fraudulent transactions was not his voice. The judge also said the jury’s decision was a “complete rejection” of his contention that it was not his voice on the call.
Judge Hornak said Banks had repeatedly insisted that he is mentally fit, and the judge found him competent to stand trial.
He said he would not consider most of his court motions, lawsuits and outlandish claims, such as his supposed relationship with Ivanka Trump or his contention that the CIA is in control of an alligator at Disney World.
But the judge said he would consider a “wholly gratuitous” involuntary bankruptcy petition Banks filed against a woman who has the same last name as the lead FBI agent in the Forex case and another filing in which he fooled a federal court into thinking that he was Roger Stone, an ally of President Donald Trump who was convicted of witness tampering and lying to federal agents.
Judge Hornak said Banks is a threat. “He is, simply put in a digital age, a danger to others and the community,” the judge said in sentencing papers, “as he has the capacity and willingness to use electronic means to harm others and in ways that would be profoundly destructive to their interests.”