The huge, last-minute payments wreaked such havoc with Carrier Finance’s over-90 day balance that Pavlo started flying a clerk to Jackson, Mississippi on the last day of the month to sit in WorldCom’s lobby and wait for the check to be handed to him. The clerk would then rush a fax of it to Carrier Finance, which would use the documentation to justify posting the sum to WorldCom’s account as if the cash were in the bank. Pavlo referred to the phantom money as “placeholder credits.”1 His workers called them The-Check’s-In-The-Mail deposits.
