The second
Chesterton resident in less than a week has been defrauded of thousands of
dollars in a phony check scam, Chesterton Police said.
According to
police, on Feb. 13 the resident reported that, in response to a job posting
on indeed.com, she accepted an offer from one “Rhoda Wilder”--purportedly an
employee of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in Albuquerque,
N.M.--to take receipt of her belongings in advance of Wilder’s move to
Chesterton and to clean her new apartment, to take a job at EPA in Chicago.
Bit of a hitch,
though: before leaving New Mexico for Indiana, Wilder had to rush to the
side of her sick son in New Delhi, India.
For that reason,
Wilder sent the resident a cashier’s check for $3,500, with these
instructions: the resident should deposit the whole $3,500 in her personal
account, then wire $2,860 to New Delhi, so that Wilder would have money on
hand when she got there to pay the movers who would be transporting her
stuff to Chesterton.
The resident, in
fact, did so. (Western Union’s $1,500 transaction limit even forced her to
divvy the $2,860 into two installments.)
Wilder subsequently
e-mailed the resident, thanking her and saying that “all is well and she
can’t wait to get back to the U.S. to her new apartment in Chesterton.”
One day later, the
resident’s debit card was declined. On making an inquiry, she discovered
that the $3,500 cashier’s check was bogus and that “her account was now in
the red.”
In his detailed
report on the incident, the investigating officer made note of the following
“psychological and emotional factors which came into play in this scam”:
* The scammer
“needs help and terrible things will happen to her if the victim does not
help.”
* The scammer “has
a sick son, sick enough to be in the hospital.”
* The scammer is
“helplessly ‘stuck’ overseas, this time in India, and things are spiraling
out of control.”
* The scammer “sets
up an employer/employee relationship in which the scammer plays the dominant
role of employer. As the employee, the victim may feel compelled to ‘go with
the program’ even when warning bells start ringing.”
* The rate of pay
which the scammer offered--$20 per hour--is “much higher than normal for
housekeeping/cleaning for the area.”
* The scammer
“sends a cashier’s check, which is more trustworthy than a personal check
since the bank secures the money for a cashier’s check.”
Also Victimized
Less than a week
later, another Chesterton resident reported losing more than $5,000 in the
same sort of phony check scam.
In this case the
resident had answered an ad posted on care.com by a woman supposedly moving
to the area and offering to pay the resident $500 as a home caregiver.
The resident then
received a check for $2,655, which--again--she was instructed to deposit in
her personal account, then wire $2,100 to an account at Bank of America to
pay for her “employer’s” movers and $500 to a different account in Arizona.
The resident did as
she was told, only to discover that she is now out of pocket more than
$5,000 in cash and bad-check charges and fees.
Warning Sign
The investigating
officer put it this way in his report: you agree to a particular transaction
with a stranger and that person sends you a check far in excess of the
stipulated sum with instructions for what to do with the balance, it’s a
scam, plain and simple.