A disbarred D.C. lawyer has been accused of depositing $2.4 million in counterfeit checks at Washington-area banks.
Howard R. Shmuckler allegedly deposited the checks between April and October 2005, according to court documents unsealed in D.C.’s federal court charging him with bank fraud.
The FBI says Shmuckler spent six months in 2005 passing counterfeit checks to area banks. According to an affidavit, Shmuckler deposited 11 checks supposedly written to him from various companies like California software giant Oracle USA, Inc. and the National Bank of Canada. The checks were returned by the companies as fakes, the affidavit said.
Calls to Shmuckler’s attorney were not immediately returned.
Shmuckler is best known in the Washington region for allegedly running an illegal mortgage modification program.
In December, the Maryland Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation issued a cease-and-desist order to the Vienna-based Shmuckler Group. The order accused Shmuckler and two other men of collecting more than $1.2 million in fees on a promise that was never kept of helping homeowners avoid foreclosure. The department says they charged 372 Maryland homeowners an average of $3,440, but only obtained loan modifications for about 25 percent of their clients. They then refused to provide refunds.
Shmuckler has a criminal history dating back to 1996, when he pleaded guilty to bankruptcy fraud after he hid a Jaguar convertible and other assets from creditors.
Following his conviction, he was banned from practicing law in California, but it took another decade for the case to catch up to him in D.C..
Shmuckler joined the D.C. bar in 1985, but was placed on administrative suspension from 1987 to 2004 because he wasn’t keeping up with his dues, D.C. bar records show. In 2004, he paid what he owed and was reinstated without informing the bar board of his California legal problems.
When the criminal conviction came to the bar’s attention in 2007, Shmuckler was suspended and then disbarred in July 2009 for committing a crime that involve moral turpitude, the bar board wrote in its decision.
Shmuckler was arrested on bank fraud charges on Feb. 19 and released on personal recognizance.
