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Beware of the people you meet online - and don't offer to cash their checks for them.
The worldwide banking community - including the North Coast - is finding the Internet to be a major new source of check fraud, and the tactics people are using to lure their victims are increasingly devious and effective.
"We've seen a whole lot of individuals that actually believe they're making a friend over the Internet," said Susie Piaskoski, operations manager at the Bank of Astoria. "That person spends up to six months chatting and getting personal. Once they get their trust, then they ask that person to negotiate (banking) items."
Here is one possible scenario: A woman meets a man on a dating Web site. His photo shows him to be very attractive, and he claims to be a wealthy businessman from the United States. After a couple weeks of chatting online, she believes him to be her boyfriend. He says he is temporarily working on a project in Nigeria, and the banks there can't cash this check he just received. If he sends it to her, could she cash it and wire him the money?
Of course, when she does so, it can take a week or more for the bank to realize the check is counterfeit.
Meanwhile, the woman has sent the cash off to Nigeria. When the bank calls her, she finds out she is responsible for paying that money back. The scammer has his money, and she is left with the damages.
Tom Unger, a spokesman for Wells Fargo Bank, said this kind of fraud, commonly called a Nigerian banking scam, leaves the customer at fault, often with no way of identifying the real culprit. It's not like when someone steals your checks, he said.
"If someone steals your personal checks, you don't lose a penny because you will have called your bank and your account is frozen," said Unger. "With a phony money order or cashier's check, when you deposit it, you're responsible for those funds. You're telling the bank you're guaranteeing the item is valid."
Scams are lurking everywhere online - not just on dating or chatting sites. They're on job sites, in banking e-mails and on e-Bay. Scammers keep finding new ways of tricking people into cashing counterfeit items, and when they do, there is little the law can do to repair the damages, which often amount to thousands of dollars. The Internet has become the most common way for predators to find their prey.
Clatsop County District Attorney Josh Marquis said he wasn't surprised people were fooled by a recent Internet scam that claimed to be recruiting secret shoppers.
"It was one of the most clever things I've ever seen," he said.
The scheme offers people money to become secret shoppers. They are sent what appears to be a cashier's check for around $3,000. After the shoppers deposit the check in their bank account, they are told to write a check for a lesser amount, about $1,200, and send it through a money-wiring service.
The check they're sent is, in fact, fraudulent, but it looks so good it's almost always initially honored by the bank. When the check bounces, weeks later, the bank debits the person's account for their $1,200 check and they discover the money they sent came out of pocket. If they call the police, they are told there is little that can be done.
"With the Internet, it's nearly impossible to track these guys down," said Marquis. "If somebody did it in Astoria, yes, we could prosecute them if we could identify them. But these people have anonymous e-mail addresses that are, in fact, being filtered through another country. The Internet is a wild frontier. It's very difficult to police."
The only way to combat these schemes is for people to be very skeptical, he said.
Piaskoski said her bank has seen a couple cases of what she calls "advance fee schemes," another way fraudsters use the lag time between when a check is deposited and when it is identified as a fake to trick people out of thousands of dollars. A Canadian lottery scam has fooled a lot of people, she said.
"They say you've won the lottery, and they say, 'We know you didn't enter the lottery. We randomly chose names, and you were chosen,'" she explained. "Then they say, 'You have to pay taxes on that money. We'll give you an advance of your lottery winnings. You wire us $3,000, and then we'll send you your lottery winning.'"
What they send looks like a cashier's check but it's counterfeit, and the bank customer loses whatever he or she pays out to cover the supposed taxes. The lottery "winnings" never arrive.
Other people are looking for jobs over the Internet, said Piaskoski, and a company offers to "hire" them to negotiate checks for businesses overseas. They are promised a percentage of the money in the check in exchange for cashing it, but when the check turns up counterfeit they end up losing all the money they wired.
Banks have been running ads, sending out fliers inside their customers' statements and posting information in their lobbies to warn people. But there are always new tricks.
"Every time we think we know what's going on a new scam comes about," said Piaskoski. "Some of the fraudsters are writing letters telling people it is very important to keep their story confidential because their taxes would be raised if anyone found out. It's no longer even good enough for us to ask our clients questions about it. They've been told by the bad guys on the other side not to tell the truth."
Marquis said he himself was nearly victimized by an Internet phishing scam recently. Phishing is when a scammer will send out a phony e-mail from a national bank, hoping the recipient will have an account there. The e-mails tell customers they need to update their bank account information. The e-mail takes them to a replica of the real bank Web site. When the customer puts their information onto the page, the scammers have everything they need to hijack the bank account.
"The site looks almost exactly like the real bank site, but what you need to do is look at the URL, the Internet address," said Marquis. "This one had the bank name but it also had the words juniordesign.ro at the end. RO is the country code for Romania."
A lot of Internet scams originate in Eastern Europe, he said, in Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine and Russia.
"Be really leery," he said. "If anyone is trying to give you money, be suspicious. No bank will write you out of the blue saying we need information like your Social Security number or your account number."
Unger said phishing is a big problem at Wells Fargo Bank because the company is so large and it has so many customers that could be targeted by a mass e-mail. He said Internet sales are another source of scams.
"Don't do business with sellers you can't identify," he warned. "Make sure you get paid before you ship anything."
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