Hi everyone. I was recently scammed on the internet and want to share my story for two reasons. 1, so that no one else who reads this falls for the same thing, and 2, maybe some wonderful person (or people) out there will scambait this guy and get him to waste his valuable time and money on wild goose chases. Getting the guy caught would be ideal, but I won’t hold my breath on that one.
I will try to be as detailed as I can but without giving any more personal information about myself to any more strangers (sorry, I’m sure most of you are righteous people but you never know who’s reading). It’s been a weird week, a slow and eye opening decent into my own naiveté and realization that I had been victimized. I’ve told this story a few times now, as I have reported it to local police and ic3.gov. As I tell it now it becomes rather obvious as to what is going on, but at the time, I could not see the whole picture. I was only given little bits of information at a time and only realized after it was too late how the pieces fit together.
I run a small business in the US. We are just two co-owners, no employees. Without going into details about who we are or what we do, I’ll say I was emailed by an individual who was looking to obtain our services. He first just started out asking if we had availability on something he wanted. I told him we did. By the way, I do want to add that this all began to take place when I had a lot else going on to distract me. I received his first email on New Years Eve. This has been a particularly busy holiday season for me because in addition to Christmas and New Years, my birthday falls very soon after and I also got engaged just a couple weeks before. My fiancé and I, who are also in the final stages of purchasing a house, spent a lot of time visiting with various relatives who were all eager to hear our plans. So to say that business stuff for me was on the back burner during this time would be an understatement. I regret now not paying as close attention as I should have.
Anyway, back to this guy’s email, he wrote back again saying that he wanted to render our services. He told me his name was Mark Pelton ([email protected]) and that he was currently in the Ukraine and would be returning to the states soon and wanted to do business with us. I told him that would be great. He then said his friend in the US would send me a check to secure the reservation for our services. I told him that would be fine. Then he tells me that a check is on the way and he sends me a UPS tracking number, which is annoying for me because it is very difficult for delivery men to find our offices and we are not always there to receive deliveries. But I now notice he was very careful to not use the US Postal Service since, I imagine, fraud over US Mail would be a federal offense and carry a hefty punishment.
Now that the check is already on it’s way he then tells me that his friend messed up and instead of sending me a check for the reservation of our services, he sent a check that included our services AND Mark’s travel expenses and says we can just reimburse him for it. Now this is already getting annoying, but the guy never asked me for my bank details so that he could “wire the money to my account” (i.e. empty my bank account) or for my social security number or any personal details so I thought it was still ok. So the check comes and I don’t remember anything shady looking about it, nothing sent off any red flags, but at this point I wasn’t suspicious so I didn’t really examine it either. What I can tell you is that the shipping label says:
Date: 1/9/15
Sender’s Name : Jason H Starr
Address: 22723 W 73rd St
City: Shawnee
State: KS
Zip: 66227
I deposit the check in our account and wait for it to clear. He says once the check has cleared to wire him the difference via Western Union. I don’t think this is a bad idea at the time because I didn’t want to send him a check and had previously thought about making up a money order to mail to him. But of course he’s flying over next week and he needs the money ASAP and can’t afford to fly over without it.
I check my bank account online and it says that the check had cleared. So I thought great, I’m safe. I’ll withdrawal the amount of the check, minus the cost of his reservation for our services, and then send him the rest of the money, minus the Western Union fee and $50 for myself for doing all the leg work as he asked me to do. I go to Western Union and make the transaction. He had me wire the money to:
Samuel Brooke
20-A Gagarina Avenue
Kharkiv, 61001, Ukraine.
He said this was his travel agent. I later receive another delivery of another check. He said that his travel agent told him the amount his friend had sent that I had wired to him wouldn’t be enough for his trip. Now I have a second check but it’s from a different person because its from a different place entirely. This envelope’s label says:
ATT
2001 Lakewood Boulevard
Hoffman Estates, IL 60192
ATT? Like AT&T? I don’t know. What does the check say? The check is from a cabinet company in Nashville, TN called ProCraft Cabinetry. The check is for the exact same amount as the first check. At this point I start to feel unsure about the whole thing but I still can’t yet see all the angles to it. But he keeps emailing me asking “Did you get the check? Please confirm! I await your urgent response!” so I tell him I got it and I’ll deposit it the first chance I get even though I don’t really mean it. He actually started to annoy me so much with his urgency that at that point my attitude was “I’ll get to it when I get to it, if I get to it at all.” He was becoming such a pain in the ass that even if he had ended up being a legit client, he would have been a real pain to work with.
So the next day I decide to sit home for a bit and watch a movie, in one way just getting the first chance to relax for a bit in a long while, and also a small way of procrastinating in dealing with this. And instead of really paying attention to the movie I’m trying to watch, I keep thinking of all this and that he sent a check and that check cleared so where’s the scam? And then I first really thought this could be a scam when I incorrectly thought that if the check was cleared by my bank then it must have been a legit check, but if this guy is a scammer and he got someone to send me a legit check, then he must be using me to scam that person. Maybe he was misrepresenting himself as an employee or owner of my business, getting someone to send me real money with one lie, and then getting me to turn it over to him with another lie. This of course, turned out not to be the case, but it got me suspicious enough to figure out what was really happening. I immediately looked at this second check again and decided to call the company. If this was a real check, and they had sent it to me, then why did they think they were sending it to me? What did they think they were going to get in return that this Mark Pelton may have promised them? I called, I got connected to their accounting department, spoke to a lady who worked there asking why she sent me a check and I didn’t even need to tell her any of what I have already written above. She immediately said “This is a scam. You have a fake check. Someone stole our account information. That account has already been closed.”
Unaware that I am now on to him, “Mark” tells me to send this next check via Western Union to:
Angela Landroy
1509 57th Avenue
Oakland, California 94621-1519
He then reminds me again that he needs the money fast because he is coming over very soon. I ask him if he needs the money so fast, why not have his friend send him the money via Western Union directly? Why send it to me first? That just adds extra time. First he ignored the question and asked me again about the check. I didn’t give him the info he wants and I tell him he didn’t answer my question and he says what question? So I ask him again and he gives an answer that makes no sense at all. He emails me again asking if I had deposited his second check and I lie and tell him yes I deposited it and I’m waiting for it to clear. And soon after that my bank informs me that the first check I deposited did indeed bounce. So now I have lost the money that I sent him.
After a bit of research and a bit of thinking, here is what I know, and some things I think I know, and some things I have done. Firstly, the most obvious, yes, that ATT return address on the second envelope I got is an address for AT&T. Why a scammer would use that, I don’t know. I Googled the return address from the first envelope and the address in California he wanted me to wire the money to and they both come up as Zillow listings. Zillow, if you don’t know, is a real estate web site. These are two addresses of houses that are listed for sale on Zillow.com and are probably unoccupied. Something else I discovered when going back to look at his original email to me is that it was sent to “Undisclosed Recipients.” If I had noticed that when I first read it, alarms would have gone off. I do not know if this “Mark Pelton” actually lives in the Ukraine or not, but he must surely have accomplices, or unsuspecting family and friends who he is using as patsies. As far as I can tell, the two checks were send from inside the US, and the first transaction I sent via Western Union was sent to the Ukraine and was received by someone there. I’d have to assume that he has someone in California ready to pick up the money he is expecting me to send. He, or someone he knows, is also able to forge a check. It fooled me and it fooled the teller at my bank. I suspect that I may have actually been emailing with more than one person acting as “Mark Pelton” working in shifts because when we started emailing with each other, his English was fairly good. In fact at first I thought he was an American who had just been over visiting the Ukraine. As things went along his English seemed to get worse, as if it were a different person typing.
I have reported this first to the ic3.gov web site which is the Internet Crime Complaint Center. I have yet to receive a response from them. I reported this to my local police who pretty much told me that beyond filing a report, there’s nothing they can do. I made a report with Western Union. I told them that my scammer did not know I was on to him and that he was expecting another transfer from me, but they would not bait him and said they had no way to catch him in this way. Pretty ridiculous. No wonder people scam other people on the internet. There are no consequences. Nothing will be done and no one “in charge” seems to care. I posted on 419eater.com to find out ways to screw with this guy but everyone’s advice has been to cease all communications and to post about it here. So this is what I’m doing.
This person does not have my personal or business bank account information, my social security number, or my personal email address. What he does have is my business address and business email address which are both displayed on our web site, so it’s not like it’s private. He does also have my name, cell phone number and home address. He got this through the Western Union transaction. He told me that in order for his “travel agent” to receive the funds, he would need, in addition to the tracking number, the sender’s name, address, and phone number. I stupidly did not double check this until later and discovered that a receiver only needs the sender’s name and the tracking number. As far as my address goes, the Western Union representative I spoke with did not speak very good English and she made a few typos on the receipt, including my home address. When I gave the info to Mark, I gave him the incorrect address as it was listed on the receipt. The actual street name is incorrect and it also does not include my apartment number. Of course, a smart hacker would probably be able to figure out the correct address, but after receiving his latest messages, I’m not sure exactly how smart he is. In addition to him not having the exact correct address, I will be moving out of state within a few months, so if he does figure out where I live, it won’t do him much good for long.
I stopped responding to his emails and last night he sent a text, via Yahoo, to my cell phone. I replied saying that he had the wrong number (the number he sent the message from just shows as 1111440601 on my phone). He texted me again today (from 1110440601) again asking why I wasn’t responding to his emails and did I deposit the check. I tell him I don’t know who he is or what he’s talking about. He asks if I’m playing a game and I tell him he either mistyped the phone number or he was given the wrong phone number. My hope is that he believes I gave a fake number for the Western Union transaction and that the address I gave is also fake. But I’m not going to count on that. The reason I start to doubt his intelligence is that he must surely know that the original check would have bounced by now, but he still insists on this lie, saying he needs the money to travel over here, when the date he was supposed to come has already passed.
I don’t really know what else to do. I have evidence of all of this. I have the envelopes the checks were sent in, I have the one fake check that was never deposited, I have the Western Union receipt, I have my bank transaction receipt, and I have a lot of emails and a few texts. If anyone can shit this guy down, you’d be my personal heroes.
I will try to be as detailed as I can but without giving any more personal information about myself to any more strangers (sorry, I’m sure most of you are righteous people but you never know who’s reading). It’s been a weird week, a slow and eye opening decent into my own naiveté and realization that I had been victimized. I’ve told this story a few times now, as I have reported it to local police and ic3.gov. As I tell it now it becomes rather obvious as to what is going on, but at the time, I could not see the whole picture. I was only given little bits of information at a time and only realized after it was too late how the pieces fit together.
I run a small business in the US. We are just two co-owners, no employees. Without going into details about who we are or what we do, I’ll say I was emailed by an individual who was looking to obtain our services. He first just started out asking if we had availability on something he wanted. I told him we did. By the way, I do want to add that this all began to take place when I had a lot else going on to distract me. I received his first email on New Years Eve. This has been a particularly busy holiday season for me because in addition to Christmas and New Years, my birthday falls very soon after and I also got engaged just a couple weeks before. My fiancé and I, who are also in the final stages of purchasing a house, spent a lot of time visiting with various relatives who were all eager to hear our plans. So to say that business stuff for me was on the back burner during this time would be an understatement. I regret now not paying as close attention as I should have.
Anyway, back to this guy’s email, he wrote back again saying that he wanted to render our services. He told me his name was Mark Pelton ([email protected]) and that he was currently in the Ukraine and would be returning to the states soon and wanted to do business with us. I told him that would be great. He then said his friend in the US would send me a check to secure the reservation for our services. I told him that would be fine. Then he tells me that a check is on the way and he sends me a UPS tracking number, which is annoying for me because it is very difficult for delivery men to find our offices and we are not always there to receive deliveries. But I now notice he was very careful to not use the US Postal Service since, I imagine, fraud over US Mail would be a federal offense and carry a hefty punishment.
Now that the check is already on it’s way he then tells me that his friend messed up and instead of sending me a check for the reservation of our services, he sent a check that included our services AND Mark’s travel expenses and says we can just reimburse him for it. Now this is already getting annoying, but the guy never asked me for my bank details so that he could “wire the money to my account” (i.e. empty my bank account) or for my social security number or any personal details so I thought it was still ok. So the check comes and I don’t remember anything shady looking about it, nothing sent off any red flags, but at this point I wasn’t suspicious so I didn’t really examine it either. What I can tell you is that the shipping label says:
Date: 1/9/15
Sender’s Name : Jason H Starr
Address: 22723 W 73rd St
City: Shawnee
State: KS
Zip: 66227
I deposit the check in our account and wait for it to clear. He says once the check has cleared to wire him the difference via Western Union. I don’t think this is a bad idea at the time because I didn’t want to send him a check and had previously thought about making up a money order to mail to him. But of course he’s flying over next week and he needs the money ASAP and can’t afford to fly over without it.
I check my bank account online and it says that the check had cleared. So I thought great, I’m safe. I’ll withdrawal the amount of the check, minus the cost of his reservation for our services, and then send him the rest of the money, minus the Western Union fee and $50 for myself for doing all the leg work as he asked me to do. I go to Western Union and make the transaction. He had me wire the money to:
Samuel Brooke
20-A Gagarina Avenue
Kharkiv, 61001, Ukraine.
He said this was his travel agent. I later receive another delivery of another check. He said that his travel agent told him the amount his friend had sent that I had wired to him wouldn’t be enough for his trip. Now I have a second check but it’s from a different person because its from a different place entirely. This envelope’s label says:
ATT
2001 Lakewood Boulevard
Hoffman Estates, IL 60192
ATT? Like AT&T? I don’t know. What does the check say? The check is from a cabinet company in Nashville, TN called ProCraft Cabinetry. The check is for the exact same amount as the first check. At this point I start to feel unsure about the whole thing but I still can’t yet see all the angles to it. But he keeps emailing me asking “Did you get the check? Please confirm! I await your urgent response!” so I tell him I got it and I’ll deposit it the first chance I get even though I don’t really mean it. He actually started to annoy me so much with his urgency that at that point my attitude was “I’ll get to it when I get to it, if I get to it at all.” He was becoming such a pain in the ass that even if he had ended up being a legit client, he would have been a real pain to work with.
So the next day I decide to sit home for a bit and watch a movie, in one way just getting the first chance to relax for a bit in a long while, and also a small way of procrastinating in dealing with this. And instead of really paying attention to the movie I’m trying to watch, I keep thinking of all this and that he sent a check and that check cleared so where’s the scam? And then I first really thought this could be a scam when I incorrectly thought that if the check was cleared by my bank then it must have been a legit check, but if this guy is a scammer and he got someone to send me a legit check, then he must be using me to scam that person. Maybe he was misrepresenting himself as an employee or owner of my business, getting someone to send me real money with one lie, and then getting me to turn it over to him with another lie. This of course, turned out not to be the case, but it got me suspicious enough to figure out what was really happening. I immediately looked at this second check again and decided to call the company. If this was a real check, and they had sent it to me, then why did they think they were sending it to me? What did they think they were going to get in return that this Mark Pelton may have promised them? I called, I got connected to their accounting department, spoke to a lady who worked there asking why she sent me a check and I didn’t even need to tell her any of what I have already written above. She immediately said “This is a scam. You have a fake check. Someone stole our account information. That account has already been closed.”
Unaware that I am now on to him, “Mark” tells me to send this next check via Western Union to:
Angela Landroy
1509 57th Avenue
Oakland, California 94621-1519
He then reminds me again that he needs the money fast because he is coming over very soon. I ask him if he needs the money so fast, why not have his friend send him the money via Western Union directly? Why send it to me first? That just adds extra time. First he ignored the question and asked me again about the check. I didn’t give him the info he wants and I tell him he didn’t answer my question and he says what question? So I ask him again and he gives an answer that makes no sense at all. He emails me again asking if I had deposited his second check and I lie and tell him yes I deposited it and I’m waiting for it to clear. And soon after that my bank informs me that the first check I deposited did indeed bounce. So now I have lost the money that I sent him.
After a bit of research and a bit of thinking, here is what I know, and some things I think I know, and some things I have done. Firstly, the most obvious, yes, that ATT return address on the second envelope I got is an address for AT&T. Why a scammer would use that, I don’t know. I Googled the return address from the first envelope and the address in California he wanted me to wire the money to and they both come up as Zillow listings. Zillow, if you don’t know, is a real estate web site. These are two addresses of houses that are listed for sale on Zillow.com and are probably unoccupied. Something else I discovered when going back to look at his original email to me is that it was sent to “Undisclosed Recipients.” If I had noticed that when I first read it, alarms would have gone off. I do not know if this “Mark Pelton” actually lives in the Ukraine or not, but he must surely have accomplices, or unsuspecting family and friends who he is using as patsies. As far as I can tell, the two checks were send from inside the US, and the first transaction I sent via Western Union was sent to the Ukraine and was received by someone there. I’d have to assume that he has someone in California ready to pick up the money he is expecting me to send. He, or someone he knows, is also able to forge a check. It fooled me and it fooled the teller at my bank. I suspect that I may have actually been emailing with more than one person acting as “Mark Pelton” working in shifts because when we started emailing with each other, his English was fairly good. In fact at first I thought he was an American who had just been over visiting the Ukraine. As things went along his English seemed to get worse, as if it were a different person typing.
I have reported this first to the ic3.gov web site which is the Internet Crime Complaint Center. I have yet to receive a response from them. I reported this to my local police who pretty much told me that beyond filing a report, there’s nothing they can do. I made a report with Western Union. I told them that my scammer did not know I was on to him and that he was expecting another transfer from me, but they would not bait him and said they had no way to catch him in this way. Pretty ridiculous. No wonder people scam other people on the internet. There are no consequences. Nothing will be done and no one “in charge” seems to care. I posted on 419eater.com to find out ways to screw with this guy but everyone’s advice has been to cease all communications and to post about it here. So this is what I’m doing.
This person does not have my personal or business bank account information, my social security number, or my personal email address. What he does have is my business address and business email address which are both displayed on our web site, so it’s not like it’s private. He does also have my name, cell phone number and home address. He got this through the Western Union transaction. He told me that in order for his “travel agent” to receive the funds, he would need, in addition to the tracking number, the sender’s name, address, and phone number. I stupidly did not double check this until later and discovered that a receiver only needs the sender’s name and the tracking number. As far as my address goes, the Western Union representative I spoke with did not speak very good English and she made a few typos on the receipt, including my home address. When I gave the info to Mark, I gave him the incorrect address as it was listed on the receipt. The actual street name is incorrect and it also does not include my apartment number. Of course, a smart hacker would probably be able to figure out the correct address, but after receiving his latest messages, I’m not sure exactly how smart he is. In addition to him not having the exact correct address, I will be moving out of state within a few months, so if he does figure out where I live, it won’t do him much good for long.
I stopped responding to his emails and last night he sent a text, via Yahoo, to my cell phone. I replied saying that he had the wrong number (the number he sent the message from just shows as 1111440601 on my phone). He texted me again today (from 1110440601) again asking why I wasn’t responding to his emails and did I deposit the check. I tell him I don’t know who he is or what he’s talking about. He asks if I’m playing a game and I tell him he either mistyped the phone number or he was given the wrong phone number. My hope is that he believes I gave a fake number for the Western Union transaction and that the address I gave is also fake. But I’m not going to count on that. The reason I start to doubt his intelligence is that he must surely know that the original check would have bounced by now, but he still insists on this lie, saying he needs the money to travel over here, when the date he was supposed to come has already passed.
I don’t really know what else to do. I have evidence of all of this. I have the envelopes the checks were sent in, I have the one fake check that was never deposited, I have the Western Union receipt, I have my bank transaction receipt, and I have a lot of emails and a few texts. If anyone can shit this guy down, you’d be my personal heroes.
