fake cheques

http://www.concordmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2006606070304

Everybody thinks they can spot the scam in time. The Nigerians who need your help getting millions out of the country. The Canadian lottery that requires you to pay the taxes up front. The overseas woman you met online who wants your help cashing her paycheck in the States.

As bogus as these lines may sound, the Concord police hear once a month from someone who took the bait. Statewide inspectors, meanwhile, said they see dozens of cases a month.

Sometimes, the police hear early enough to help. Often, they don't because too few people take the extra - and easy - steps to protect themselves. There's a reason why, says Concord police Detective Mark Dumas, who teaches officers how to investigate these cases.

You'd be surprised how convincing the scammers - and more important, their phony checks -can be. And victims falsely think that once a bank cashes a check it has "cleared." That's not so.

"Look at this. There is nothing to alert you," Dumas said last week as he held a magnifying lens to a counterfeit cashier's check worth $4,700. It bore the name of a legitimate bank and had the multicolor printing, security marks and perforated edges of a real check.

The checked arrived at a Concord home last month with a letter telling the recipient she'd won $69,000 in a Canadian lottery. She was to cash the check, return the $4,700 to Canada to cover "federal and international taxes" and await her winnings. Had a bank teller not tipped the woman to the lottery scam, she would have sent the scammers $4,700 from her own account only to find out a week or so later that the check was a fraud. By then, she'd be out the money because the police can almost never catch the thieves.


"I tell the (officers I teach), 'You can't look at these people and say I'd never fall for that,'" Dumas said. He's seen professionals, the elderly and the young fall for these schemes. "All you can do is be sympathetic."

A Concord man who thought he'd met his dream woman in an online chatroom found out too late that he'd been scammed.

Within four days, the couple had talked enough to fall in love, Dumas said. The "woman" claimed to be a model working overseas and said she needed the Concord man's help cashing her paychecks because she didn't trust the foreign banks. She sent him three checks totaling $6,000 with a request that he cash them and wire her back the money.

The checks looked legitimate, and the man agreed. There is almost always an additional enticement for the victim in these scams. With enough cash, the online lover can buy a plane ticket and visit. The Concord man is now making regular restitution payments to the bank, and it looks like his dream woman may have been a Nigerian man, Dumas said.

Often victims will later say they were skeptical until the bank cashed the check. The fakes are too good to detect on sight, and what many people don't realize is that a cashed check is not necessarily a cleared check, said Susan LeDuc, a banking expert with the Gallagher, Callahan and Gartrell law firm in Concord.

Federal banking laws require banks to make money available to customers in a timely period, typically within a few days. A bank can hold a check longer only if it has a specific reason to think it is fraudulent. (A mere suspicion is not enough.) But it takes a week or more for a check to make its way through the system to actually clear or be discovered as a fake.

By then, the victims have too often sent the money from the cashed check back to the scammers.

LeDuc wrote an article a year and a half ago about these scams advising the public and banks how to protect themselves. "It was going on then, and it's getting more difficult and more pervasive," she said.

Mike Blanchard, a postal inspector in Manchester, agreed. Local agencies refer cases to him, and he's getting dozens a month, he said. "It's still as prevalent as rain," Blanchard said. "It just keeps coming and coming." And prosecuting the scammers is so difficult that Blanchard called the check-cashing scam as close to the prefect crime as one can get.

But LeDuc's advice is still plenty of protection, if the public and banks follow it.

• Investigate the bank named on the check. If it does exist, call the bank by looking up the number yourself, not by relying on the phone number printed on the check. Confirm that the check was indeed issued and verify the check number, payee, issue date, amount and authorized signer.

• Don't assume that if you recognize the bank as a local one that it's legitimate. LeDuc recently learned from Franklin Savings Banks that some of its checks had been altered.

• Talk with the bank teller about what you are doing. They recognize the most common scams. Bank tellers have also begun initiating the conversation, but it can be tricky for banks trying to balance customer privacy and customer protection, LeDuc said.

• If you do cash a check, wait the extra time for it to actually clear. Banks are also encouraged to clarify the difference between available funds and cleared funds.

• If a bank cannot confirm that a check is issued, that is enough to hold it until it clears. Also, banks can offer (or be asked by customers) to send a check to collection before cashing it. If it comes back as legitimate, it is safe to spend the money.

• Report scams to the police.

Sovereign Bank recently saved a Concord couple $3,000 and maybe more by spotting fake cashier's checks. And the bank acted so quickly, the Concord police were able to pull one over on the scammers.

The couple advertised their used car in the Monitor. When the classifieds made it to the online version of the paper, someone overseas responded. The buyer agreed to pay the $2,000 asking price but wanted to send an extra $3,000 for shipping. The Concord couple was to wire that extra money to the person who was going to send the car overseas.

The money arrived in the form of 10 cashier's checks that bore sequential numbers and the coloring and design of legitimate checks. The bank teller who was asked to cash them recognized a problem. The checks were supposedly issued by MasterCard; she knew MasterCard didn't offer cashier's checks.

When the case made it to Dumas at the Concord police, he took over negotiations with the people overseas interested in the car. He stalled and resisted their pushy demands. He got about 20 calls in three days demanding the money. They even threatened to call the police on him.

Dumas strung them along with hopes of tracking their location. He finally persuaded them to wire him some money, saying he needed assurance that the wiring process would work. They agreed and sent him about $50.

The scammers eventually disappeared because they knew that enough time had passed for the phony checks to come back as frauds. (The scammers are pushy because they only have at most 10 days to get their money before the bank is onto their phony check.)

Dumas never learned the identity or location of the scammers, but he and the bank saved the Concord couple $3,000. And he made a few bucks off the bad guys for a change.

(Annmarie Timmins can be reached at 224-5301, ext. 323 or at atimmins@cmonitor.com. Susan LeDuc's full article is available at gcglaw.com/resources/financial/cashiers.html.)