Monday, October 5, 2015

Altoona, IA - Scammin'

Amazing isn’t it how many scammers there are in the world? Who want to cheat honest, hard working people out of the fruits of their labors. We don’t usually come into contact with many but we met a doozie recently. It all began when we decided to decrease the size of our storage unit - to decrease the costs associated with it. We‘ve been thinking about it and had actually signed up for 2 months in Des Moines next year to take care of this. We mentioned this to Cathy, Gary’s sister, who’s tuned in to furniture since she used to be a designer for a furniture store in town. She told us of a place which took consignment furniture so, we thought, why not check it out? We did and decided to see what we could do in the short time we had left here in Des Moines.

Our first concern was that if it didn’t sell within the 90 days that this consignment store allotted, then what? We would be in Arizona with no plans of returning. Oops. We had taken some pictures into the shop and, once they looked at them, they assured us that they would sell. We’re looking at the two Mission-style love seats, the Mission-style coffee table and the 2 Mission-style end tables. I always thought that this was a pretty cool living room. And, it was so cosy with company to talk. But it was the view out the windows that sold the house - a pond with ducks and geese on it.
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But, before we took it over, we decided to list it all on Craig’s List first. We wanted to check all opportunities. I wrote up several ads, put in some pictures and had my ads on Craig’s list for Des Moines. The next morning, at 7:00 sharp, I heard the phone ‘bing’, signaling that a text message had come through. Wow, that was fast, I thought. It was someone who wanted to know if we still had the furniture for sale. He was interested in it for a gift and was working for Turner Corp in a very rural area with little access to e-mail and phone. (Hmmm - then why can he text?) We texted back and forth but continued with our daily routine. On the chance that this was legit, we re-opened our PayPal acc’t for his payment. Finally, on our way out to do some errands, we got a text from him telling us that his moving company needed an up-front payment of $1400 but that he had included that in the money he sent to Paypal for the furniture. He also told us that PayPal would send us an e-mail about the arrival of the money into our account but that sometime PayPal e-mails got caught in “Junk’ mail and, could we please check our Junk e-mail.

Nope. This is a definitely a scam and we’re not playing any more with it. It was interesting for a bit but this is not real. So, we dropped it - we didn’t text him back. A few hours later, we got an e-mail from him: ‘ WHAT’S GOING ON THERE?’ What chutzpah!!! Chiding us for not answering. Then we checked our ‘Junk’ e-mail and found a PayPal e-mail. My word, it had the PayPal logo, the PayPal seal, the signature of the President and the CFO, it had a guarantee that the money in our account was safe. No wonder people get caught in scams like this. They’d check this e-mail, get an assurance that their money was guaranteed and send out $1400. These scammers are good.

Funny thing, we got another text from a second scammer: same wording except this guy was a soldier on deployment and couldn’t get phone calls and e-mails either - just text me, he said. Do they copy each other’s scams? Do they work in the same office? Who knows? We also got several others that were not as elaborate and I just texted back: ‘Please call.’ They’ll never call - phone calls can be traced.
An interesting slice of the underside of life.
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