I almost got scammed out of $631,000

According to the document, the scam began back in January, after the county received emails asking officials to update the account information for “Jay Hemphill” and “Hemphill Construction Company.”

Hemphill, which is based in Florence, is working on the second and third phases of the Reunion Parkway project. The county learned of the scam after the real company contacted them asking for payment.

The fraudulent emails came in on January 31, 2024, and again on February 7. Both were from someone calling themselves Kesha Jackson.

That correspondence was then forwarded to Comptroller Na’Son White by County Administrator Greg Higginbotham.

White replied to the emails, confirming the payment data had been changed, and received an email from someone posing as Jay Hemphill, CEO of Hemphill Construction Company, asking if there were any outstanding invoices. She replied saying there was a payment slated for February 21.

Hemphill was founded by the late William Hemphill. Today, its president and CEO is Richard Rula.

The county submitted an electronic check for $128,989.97 to the fake Hemphill account on February 20. A second payment of $1,073,870.66 was paid to the account again on March 5. The invoice was for $1.8 million, but the full amount was not available, the police report states.

Days later, on March 11, Renasant Bank said the payment had been returned. White contacted “Jay Hemphill,” who gave her a new account number with Bank of America. On March 12, a $1.54 million payment was made.

“The real Hemphill Construction was going through the proper process, and then somehow... whether this guy was watching the claims docket or had intimate knowledge of this particular county, he was able to put forth a false claim through the purchasing clerk and the comptroller was able to change the bank account information, I believe more than once to a couple of different banks,” Baxter said.

Sources say that White spoke to Hemphill directly and that the person posing as Hemphill had an accent.

White told deputies the invoices were legitimate and sent from the company for work done on the Reunion project. “The only difference she could find in the emails [was] that the invoices came from a ‘.com’ email address... whereas a ‘.us’ was used for the ACH payment form.”