A year or two ago, Reno resident Valerie Lamb received a letter in the mail. Inside was a check for $3,000 saying it could be hers, if she was interested in becoming a mystery shopper.
“And said, I would have to do a mystery shopper and what not, and I said ‘okay,'” Lamb tells us.
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Lamb says she opened up a separate account at her bank and followed instructions.
“Basically don’t buy anything; just go in and see how people treat you,” Lamb says about what she was told.
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She says of the couple thousand dollars in the account, she spent $25 in purchases. At about that time the check company told Valerie they wanted her to take the money and get a money order.
She was ready to do so until the company said to make that money order out in her daughter’s name.
“The bank is right across the way. So I went to talk to them before I did the transaction. And that’s when we found out it wasn’t legitimate,” Lamb says.
“The money is there and in your account. But it is very possible in a couple weeks, the bank comes back and says we have a bogus check. It is counterfeit. And now you owe us the money we put in your account. If you have gone out and taken that money out, you are on the hook for that,” says Tim Johnston with the
.
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In Valerie’s case, she was only out that $25. Other check recipients can be responsible for the full $3,000 if they spend it.
Johnston says those in their 20s are the biggest target for this scam. Johnston suspects it’s because this age group is not familiar with how checks and banks work.
Once a check is deposited, funds are available within about 24 hours of that deposit. The bank covers the initial cost. It takes more than a week for the actual money from the check to clear and be put in the account. If the check is bogus, the bank will go back to the customer and demand their money back.
The BBB calls fake check fraud, “an exploding epidemic.”
The best advice is to just throw out these bogus checks when they arrive in the mail.
Source: https://t-tees.com
Category: WHY
