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SIERRA VISTA — Sitting in her living room, Susana Aguilar-Rice lays out three different checks, totaling more than $18,000.
“That would pay a lot of our debts,” she said.
Anyone who cashed these checks, however, would soon find themselves owing even more money.
Aguilar-Rice and her husband, Kip, are the latest of the many people across the country to become the targets of elaborate scams seeking to rob them of thousands of dollars by cashing fraudulent checks.
 Susana Aguilar-Rice and her husband, Kip Rice, in their Sierra Vista home Tuesday. The Rices spotted a fraud scheme, which included them receiving several large amount checks for property they wanted to rent out. (Mark Levy-Herald/Review) |
Only a day after her husband listed a house for rent on the popular Web site craigslist.com last month, Aguilar-Rice said they began receiving numerous e-mails from all over the world from people ready to send them thousands of dollars to hold the property for them.
“We got four e-mails from the United Kingdom, one e-mail from Turkey, one from South Africa,” she said.
Most of the e-mails shared similar themes. A young woman, often a student, working in a high-paying job, would offer to send a check for thousands of dollars to reserve the house, along with a plea to remove the listing from the Web site.
“They would say, ‘We’re sending you the money Monday. Please take it off the listing,’ ” she said.
Any time the e-mailers were asked to fill out an application or follow procedures that did not fall in line with the quick depositing of a check they were ready to send, they simply ignored the request.
“They would reply oblivious to what we had asked them,” Aguilar-Rice said.
The goal of the scam was to have the homeowner deposit the checks, some for as much as $8,000, and then send a portion of what they had deposited via person-to-person money transfers, for example Western Union. The money would be sent to another person for varying reasons, like the person receiving the money was a friend who was storing their belongings, and needed the money to transport them to the house they were now renting.
“So here you are, thinking, these people just sent me $8,000. I don’t want them to get here, and their stuff not to be here,” she said.
By the time the check was discovered to be fake, the money sent by the unsuspecting homeowner would be in the hands of the person running the scam.
Tracy Grady, public information officer with the Sierra Vista Police Department, said advances in technology allow nearly anyone with enough money to print checks that appear authentic.
“The whole thing is that these people are trying to get you to give them money, that’s the bottom line,” she said.
Variations of the scheme include an individual receiving a check in the mail, claiming they have won an obscure lottery or similar prize. A letter accompanying the check will instruct the recipient to deposit it and then send a portion of it as “taxes” to a false organization.
In Aguilar-Rice’s case, it was someone claiming to be a young woman named Sarah, a pathologist working for the World Health Organization in the United Kingdom.
“I just finished a project here in (the) UK for the treatments [sic] of drinking water and to educate most villagers on intensive health care,” reads one e-mail from Sarah.
Aguilar-Rice said her suspicions peaked when the check sent from Sarah was postmarked from Minnesota, and the check itself was from a bank in Florida.
“I said, there is something funny here,” Aguilar-Rice said.
Though Aguilar-Rice and her husband managed to realize what was happening before cashing a check, not everyone is so lucky.
“If it’s too good to be true, it probably is,” Grady said.
If someone receives an unexpected check in the mail, one simple way to determine its validity is to call any phone number that appears on the check. Often times the number will be answered by someone with only limited knowledge of the scam and is unable to answer simple questions regarding the check, its origins and other things, she said.
In the meantime, Aguilar-Rice and her husband have reported the scam to federal authorities. They say they have met honest people online and made successful deals with them, though they have received more fraudulent offers following similar patterns.
“It’s just sad, especially since it’s close to Christmas,” Aguilar-Rice said.
Anyone who suspects they may be the target of a fraudulent check scheme is advised to contact the Sierra Vista Police Department at 452-7500.
Herald/Review reporter Derek Jordan can be reached at 515-4680 or by e-mail at derek.jordan@svherald.com.
first svian wrote on Dec 11, 2008 6:40 AM: