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Business owners who receive a large order with instructions to ship it to another city should question why a customer would go to that trouble and expense rather than make the purchase at a nearby store.
Lisa Irish
The Daily Courier
Three recent scams seeking money or ordering large quantities of goods are making the rounds, and businesses and residents should be on alert.
A Prescott restaurant recently received an email asking if it could provide 150 individual orders of grilled chicken with Caesar salads for a birthday party. The email stated that the order would be paid with a credit card, and a private shipper would pick up the order later that afternoon, said Traces Gordon, crime prevention specialist with the Prescott Police Department. The restaurant owner reported the incident, suspecting fraud.
A Prescott store owner recently said she’d received similar email requests for large quantities of yarn, Gordon said.
“This scam has been going around for a while,” Gordon said.
Pre-payment is often made via a stolen credit card. The scammer may ask the proprietor to overcharge the credit card by a large amount and wire the overage to a shipping company that supposedly will be picking up the order. Alternatively, the order is cancelled at the last minute, and the scammer demands a refund by company check or cash, claiming the credit card originally used for payment has been canceled.
If you receive an email like this, think about why someone would want to order such a large quantity and ship it instead of getting the item from a local business, Gordon said.
“Remember, if it seems too good to be true, it probably is not legitimate,” said Deputy Scott Reed with the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office.
Take a close look at the email’s grammar, spelling and punctuation, which may indicate it was written by someone who does not speak the language and is most likely a scam, Gordon said.
In another scam, a Prescott man recently cashed two money orders from a buyer for an item he was selling on Craigslist, only to learn the money orders were fraudulent – fortunately before he shipped the item to the buyer, according to a police report.
The buyer had originally asked the man to send him back an additional $90 he’d included in the one of the money orders, according to the police report.
“A big tip-off or red flag on any transaction on Craigslist, eBay, or other Internet sites is if someone wants to pay more than they need to for something,” Reed said. “That does not make sense to anybody. If that happens, cancel the transaction.”
A Chino Valley woman said someone hacked into her husband’s computer and sent out a fraudulent email stating they were stranded in Manila and needed cash.
“My grandson received it on his cellphone and called me, and I sent out emails to everyone on my husband’s mailing list letting them know it wasn’t true,” the woman said. “It’s scary this kind of thing can happen. These people should apply this kind of energy to good things.”
This particular scam had been going on for quite a while and plays on people’s goodwill and desire to help out their friends and relatives, Reed said.
“Make the effort to call the friend or relative to verify the information, and most likely you’ll learn it’s a scam,” Reed said.