Fraud, Fun, and Toys

FRAUD

Mike's instructions to me.




The forged check the scammer was trying to get me to pass. Had I deposited this in my account this is what could have happened to me.


The UPS label from 'Mike' in Fort Madison Iowa. Note that the shipping label says it was mailed from Omaha, Nebraska.

I have to admit that I had quite a bit of fun on Wednesday when some asshole tried to get me to pass a forged check for him. While I may be dumb and gullible, at least I am also getting older and wiser at the same time. Perhaps most of you know this scam by now, apparently it is fairly common, but it was still interesting to experience it myself.

I told the story at the office the other day and my friends couldn't figure it out right away and I can certainly see how it might fool some people. For an hour or so on Wednesday I became an amature private detective trying to unravel the mystery of the $2,500.75 'cashiers' check that showed up by UPS at my house in the morning.

I suppose I should go back to the beginning of the story.

On November 25th I put an item up for sale on Craigslist. The item was my wife's old embroidery machine; here is the link.

Now, Craigslist has all kinds of warnings about scammers all over the place but since I'm an old pro at buying things online I didn't think I needed to worry about that sort of thing. I have hundreds and hundreds of transactions on Ebay as both buyer and seller. Why should I be concerned? Well, you see, Ebay knows *WHO YOU ARE* and has a fairly decent ranking system. Nobody would buy an expensive item on Ebay from someone with a low feedback rating. Meanwhile, Craigstlist is about as safe as walking down the back alley of the seedy side of town in comparison.

Shortly after I put up my listing I was contacted by someone who expressed an interest in the item. They asked to see a picture of the machine; a request I found rather odd since the listing had a picture. In reply I explained that and this seemed to satisfy the buyer. The email address and name appeared to come from someone at a fabric store so, of course, must have been legitimate. The buyer was very, very, anxious that I agree that the item was 'sold' and that I cancel the online listing immediately. I decided to do no such thing.

The person said they would buy the machine and would send a cashiers check. They said I wouldn't have to complete the transaction until the funds had cleared my bank. I sort of went along with the attitude that if the check cleared it was no skin off my back. The radar went off when on November 29th I received an email saying that the check was on the way but there had been a mistake made and the check was accidentally made out for too much. Instead of $500 the check, which had already been sent, was for $2,500. However, this nice buyer was quite trusting of me and said that not only could I keep the $500 for the item but I could keep an extra $50 for my hassle. All they asked was that I wire transfer the additional funds and, again, once only after they had cleared.

This all sounded mighty suspicious to me and I sent some emails expressing my deep skepticism about the entire transaction. I asked for the buyers paypal account or some other more conventional way to do the transaction. I certainly had no interest in wire transferring money to anyone.

Now, at this time had I simply clicked on the link that Cragistlist provides I would have known exactly what was going on, but I'm kind of glad I didn't. This way was more fun.

My life is a busy one and I generally forgot about the entire affair and revised my posting on Craigstlist to make it clear the item was still available for sale.

You can imagine my surprise when on Wednesday morning early the UPS man showed up with an overnight letter containing a check for $2,500.75.

It was at this time that I went into detective mode. Inside the envelope was the most ridiculous message imaginable. It said I was supposed to wire transfer the excess funds to someone named Michael Lake in Fort Madison, Iowa and, most importantly, contact the buyer the instant I had done so. I was given an email address to contact that was different that the person I had been corresponding with.

I was still trying to figure out how this scam worked exactly. Nobody could get any money unless it was a legitimate check, right? As my spidey sense went off I started my investigation.

The check was drawn against a company called TCA and included their address. So, the first thing I did was try to find out just who this TCA organization was, especially since it sure didn't sound like 'Jenny's Fabrics'. A quick google search led me to this website. Since I can't read Chinese that didn't help me out too much. Soon I found a link that gave me a bit more information.

So, this seemed odd. Apparently the Travis Christian Academy was trying to buy my wife's embroidery machine. The next thought that entered my head was that I did in fact have a name. The name of the person I was suposed to wire transfer the money to. Unfortunately (and apparently intentionally) I didn't have a full address or enough information to wire transfer the money even if I wanted to.

This led to a detour in my investigation that was a bit of a mistake. I did a Google search for Michael Lake in Fort Madison Iowa without much success. I took a look into Fort Madison Iowa and found out there was a major penitentiary located there. Aha I thought! Somehow someone from prison is trying to scam me. Next I called the Madison State Prison and talked to the warden only to find out that there were no Michael Lake's there. He was entertained by my story and I still think we had a nice chat.

Even though the Micahel Lake angle had hit a dead end I had a lot more leads to track down. Of course, I had the check itself. It listed the name of the bank it was drawn against. I called the bank and spoke to a nice lady on the phone there. It was at this point I first had definitive proof that it was a forged check. The check was drawn against Norwest Bank of Texas. The funny thing is that the bank had changed its name and was now a Wells Fargo bank. Yes, they did have an account with the Travis Christian Academy and, no, I was not the first person to receive one.

I got off of the phone promising the nice lady I would forward all of the information I had to their fraud investigation department. Now that I knew somebody was trying to use me to pass a forged check I was a little bit pissed off. I wanted to 'catch the guy'. I had one more critical piece of information to examine. I had the UPS packing slip with the tracking number.

According to the packing slip the item came from Omaha, Nebraska. However, when I tracked the shipment I found it had actually come from Corraville, Iowa at around 9pm the night before. So much for the check having been 'accidentally made out for the wrong amount' a week or two before.

Suddenly, I knew I had him now!!! UPS would have all of the account information to catch the bastard who had sent me this bogus check. I called back the bank to talk to the guy in their fraud department. His general attitude was with sigh of resignment. Once he explained the extent of the scam I realized just how little there is anyone can do about it. (That is other than telling the story on the Internet to get a little bit of publicity out there.)

What the fraud expert said to me was "The Michael Lake's of the world have no idea that they are involved in anything. They are being scammed to." How is that I wondered. It turns out that in addition to trying to get me to pass a forged check to the bank the scammer has another guy who thinks he has just got this great 'work from home' job that simply involves processing some financial documents for a large corporation. He's just as much of a patsy as I was.

Still, I wondered, how do the scammers get their money? The check is forged and the money gets wire transferred to the patsy?

This is when the fraud officer explained to me that the people behing this are ghosts. They use puppets, like the guy who sends the checks and dupes who pass them on, while they hide behind false IP addresses from Africa or some Eastern European company. They are untouchable and untraceable.

But, what about the check you ask? Well, it turns out there really is a Travis Christian Academy and they really have a bank account. The check is by no means any sort of 'cashiers check' it is just a check against their business account. Some number of these checks may get honored before they are found out to be bad. By then the poor church finds out they have been the victims of a crime. The guy who cashed the check so he could get money for his item has just passed a forged check across state lines; needless to say he has some 'explaining to to do' to the authorities and is legally liable for the funds since HE PASSED THE FORGED CHECK! The patsy who sent it? If found, he is in trouble to.

These scammers cast a wide net and only need one of these checks to get honored for them to make a very large score for a very modest investment.

Finally, how does the scammer get the mony? Well, remember that my letter did not contain enough information for me to send the money to Michael Lake. Were I to cash the check and do the 'honorable' thing and forward the remaining amount I would have to ask for the wire transfer information to get the money to Michael Lake. Well, of course they would then give me all kinds of account numbers but they most certainly would not go to Michael Lake. They would end up in their off shore account which is, surely, impossible to track down itself.

That is the whole of the story. After having all of this occur can you imagine my reaction when "Jenny's Fabrics" sent me the following email this morning:

"John
Whats happening with the money you have with you . Please let me know as soon as possible or i report this case to the police. "

By this time I knew there was nothing that could be done to catch these assholes so I decided to do the next best thing and vent. I informed 'Jenny's Fabrics' that the check was fraudulant, that he was so stupid he put the wrong bank name on the check so that *none* of the forged checks he had sent out (and the fraud guy told me that he received four submitted to be cashed on the same day I received mine) would be honored. I then launched into a tirade of profanity that, while it will probably just make the prick laugh, made me feel good for a moment.

It's a dangerous world out there guys when someone can just copy your bank routing number and then start passing bad checks against your account while hiding out in Africa or Central Europe. Scary stuff!!!

After typing all of this up I decided to do a Google search to see some examples of stories other people had posted after getting hit by a scammer on Craigslist. One of the first links I hit was to this site. This has got to be one of the funniest things I have ever read on the Internet. Check it out! And, to give this post even the tiniest Freemason theme, I suspect the guy who wrote this piece is a Master Mason. He has a friend named 'Hiram', his priest is Father Due Guard (spelled Duggard) and he closes by calling his protagonist 'Brother'. Finally, at the end he lectures the scammer on morality and the quality of men he involves himself with and signs off as 'Mason Duggard'

Here is a link to a newspaper article that explains the scam in a clear fashion.

FUN!

Well, that takes care of the fraud portion of the post, now on to the fun. Last evening Troy DeMolay chapter had a lock-in. Every member was required to bring at least one friend along. We had about 16 teenagers total and five adults show up. After setting up the equipment I want to the Chinese restaurant in town and bought an enormous amount of food.

We all enjoyed the feast in the dining area and then the boys went upstairs. I brought my InFocus DLP350 projector, my 11foot projection screen, my 1,000 watt dolby surround sound system, an XBOX360 and a new Nintendo Wii. Once I got all of this set up the XBox-360 with the surround sound on the giant screen was simply mind blowing. No arcade could have matched the setup we had for the guys last night.

In addtional there were serveral Xbox and a variety of other machines. Wires, televisions, snaked around the lodge floor. The big hit of the evening was Alex's Nintendo Wii. Everyone seems absolutely enthralled with the new controller. There was a very robust boxing match going on all of the way up until 3:30am until I put a stop to it.

Alex got his Nintend Wii a little over a week ago when a friend of ours who works at Target called to let us know that a shipment had just arrived. Alex and leaped into the car and rushed up to the store. I pulled in front of the entrance so Alex could jump out of the car and rush into the electronics section before the shipment of a whole seven machines would be gone. We could only imagine how many others had received the same tip-off phone call we had received. Alex may not have much to open up on Christmas day but he sure doesn't seem to mind now.

We did encounter one interesting glitch yesterday. When Alex first got the Wii he tried to hook it up to our Internet connection. At first the thought he got it to work but then he just kept getting errors. I had a network technician scheduled to show up at the house this week so I figured we would get it straigtened out then.

After the network guy got everything straightened out the Wii still wouldn't connect to the Internet. We kept getting a message "Error code 110213". I went upstairs and typed that code in the Google. The first link that comes up is 'Error code 110213 makes us cry' followed by text that indicates the solution to this problem is that you have to return your Wii to Nintendo.

Oh no!!! When browsing the copious number of articles on the Internet you would get the impression that some percentage of Wii systems were 'flawed'. It turns out, this is not the case. There is nothing wrong with Alex's Wii or anyone else's. When they are returned they will get a new firmware install and just go right back out again. It turns out that when you first connect a Wii to the Internet it tries to run a live update of the software. In some cases this update fails and leaves the Wii in a corrupted state in which there is no way to recover other than having to return it to get reinstalled. Sucks for Nintendo, but it really isn't that big of a deal. The machine still plays games just fine anyway, you just can't connect to the Internet.

Fortunately Nintendo is being helpful and if you give them a credit card you don't have to return your machine immediately. They will send you a replacement and you can immediately return you old one using pre-paid shipping. I think they are handling the situation very well. They have my sympathy, that is some scary crap. Launching a hardware product like that has to be so perfect that even one tiny small software glitch can result in a massive recall.

TOYS!


Finally, I will close this post with my new toy. I went ahead and purchased my own Christmas present ahead of time. At first I was going to let my wife buy it for me so I could open it but I decided that was a bad idea. I was afraid she wouldn't get the 'right one'.

Over the past few months I have been watching videos on my Pocket PC. I found that I really enjoyed it and I kind of wanted to get a dedicated media player. My daughter has an Ipod with video but I wasn't impressed. Anyway, I don't like Apple products and I don't like Ipod's. The promote restricted formats and that just isn't my thing.

I would have considered a Zune I suppose but I really wanted the media player with the greatest range of features.

I found it and I am thrilled. I purchased an Archos 604 Wi-Fi from Amazon.com and it is an amazing device.

This contraption can do so many things it takes a while to describe completely. The best way I can give you an idea of its coolness factor is to think of it as a portable Tivo.

In using the Archos you can drop it into a docking station and have it record any TV show you might want, just like with a Tivo. You can watch recorded shows, pause, fast forward, rewind etc. Where it departs from a Tivo is when you depart your home. As you leave the house you grab your Archos, drop it into your pocket, and you can now watch any of your recorded shows while you are traveling. This would be really convenient for people who commute by mass transportation and have a long wait.

The screen on the Archos is quite large, bright, and vibrant. Its certainly more like watching something on a portable DVD player than one of those miniscule screens on the Zune or Ipod. It has a respectable battery life and a nice form factor.

As far as 'what else' it can do. It has a 30gb hard drive. You can, of course, use it is as a conventional USB hard drive either to copy media or simply to transfer data. It can play MP3 files and has a very attractive interface with album art. It allows you to view photo-albums and is very fast with a nice interface for that feature. You can view normal documents so I suppose you could use it as a book reader. You can use it as an audio-recorder. It also works as a camcorder if you connect a small camera; which is available as an accessory.

Finally, the most exciting feature of the 604 wifi is, of course, the WI-FI!! You can browse the Internet anytime and anywhere you are in range of a WiFi network. Since the screen is larger than most handheld devices and it has some ineresting zooming technology, you really can read a number of websites conveniently. The most fun part of the WiFi feature is that it connects seamlessly to the wireless network in your home. While sitting outside I can browse the hard drives of every single machine in my home and even PLAY AUDIO AND VIDEO directly over the Wi-Fi connection! So, not only does it have 30gb internal, within your home you can add to that all of the storage on all of the machines connected to your WiFi network! You can copy files back and forth.

What really makes the Archos 604 stand out is the seamless integration between your big screen TV and this tiny hand held device. I scanned in a movie at nearly full DVD resolution using DivX. When I played it back on my 73 inch projection screen you couldn't tell it wasn't coming off of a DVD player!

Ok, well that is all of the 'good'. Now, here is the 'bad'.

The interface is extremely bizarre and clunky. The operating system is Linux based (you can even download the source code from their website). Icons are arranged across the screen and there are arrow buttons to navigate. However, when you hit the right button so the next logical icon would be the next one on the next row it simply stops. Instead you have to hit the 'down arrow' and then back up to the first column using the left arrow key. This is simply bizarre.

The interface is confusing (for example I have yet to figure out how to 'pause' a video.) The icons are crisp and clear and the features fairly easy to understand and find. The real problem is the navigation of that interface. For example, when browsing the web there is no easy way to simply hit the 'back button'. Instead, you have to hit the 'menu' key, then use the up/down arrows to get to the navigation entry and then the 'left/right' arrows to find 'back' and, finally, hit the 'ok' button to select. Now, that said, it does remember that as the last selection so the next time all you have to do is hit 'menu' and 'ok'; but when you consider that the device has a touch screen it seems like they could have improved navigation substantially.

In online reviews of the Archos I have heard people complain that the processor is underpowered or 'slow'. I'm not certain that is the case since nearly everything on the device is really fast with the exception of the web browser. I was blown away by how fast and responsive the video, music, file browser, and image gallery options are. The web browser, on the other hand, is sluggish. And, not even the whole thing. Pictures come up very fast but other things are quite slow.

In conclusion the device does have some quirks and isn't 'perfect' by any stretch of the imagination. Since it does all of this, I would just as well get rid of my Pocket PC. It might was well bite the bullet and simply be a PDA too. Since the software can be revised these kinds of applications might be made available in the future. Nevertheless, the Archos 604 wifi offers so much more, with less compromise, than any of the other media players on the market. I'm sure having a lof of fun with mine!!