Utah victims recount scams
Even the financially savvy can be taken by fraudsters
"I have been in the financial field for 25 years ... and I thought I knew what I was doing," said Joyce Zumwalt, who thought she was having a stroke of good luck recently when a check for nearly $3,000, presumably from AAA thanking her for years of faithful business, arrived in her mailbox.
"I thought, 'Good things sometimes happen to good people,"' said Zumwalt, who double-checked the address, phone number and company insignia on the check before depositing it into her account at Granite Credit Union.
Luckily, what Zumwalt didn't do was reach a person at a phone number provided on the correspondence who would have likely asked her to send some money back to cover fees or the like — a common check scam.
Ultimately, Zumwalt's check proved to be no good, which she learned only after writing checks against the funds. But instead of racking up hundreds of dollars in returned check fees, the credit union worked with Zumwalt to mitigate the impact of the fraud.
Check scams like the one that snared Zumwalt often lead victims to believe they've won big money in a lottery or sweepstakes. Fraudsters send a check to the victims, then ask them to wire money back to cover various costs and fees. By the time the check is found to be bogus, the victim has already sent the requested money.
"My No. 1 rule is: If it costs money to get money, it's a scam," said Tauna MacPherson, a vice president at First National Bank.
Because of strict regulations mandating the time in which deposited funds must be made available, as well as privacy laws and the increasing sophistication of fraudsters, financial institutions can only do so much in protecting their customers, officials said.
Still, said Jeanine Bader, fraud security manager for Deseret First Credit Union, they do what they can in terms of training tellers to look for suspicious-looking checks, waiving returned check fees or offering interest-free loans to victims who have lost large sums of money.
"Some victims come to us and believe that our insurance covers fraud when it does not," Bader said. "But we really want to help these individuals."
Bader shared the story of a credit union member, a professional, educated man, who met a woman on a popular online religious dating site and gave her $5,000 for her child's educational needs. The woman, Bader said, turned out to be an accomplished scam artist with a lengthy history.
Recent comments
I was scammed for 10,000 and now I have to figure a way to pay it...
Barbara | Oct. 1, 2007 at 5:47 p.m.
Figure it out people. If you have any piece of a brain you can spot...
Master of the obvious | Sept. 27, 2007 at 8:46 a.m.
This week I received a letter stating I had won a prize, I need send...
Anonymous | Sept. 27, 2007 at 8:09 a.m.
