OREM — A Provo man unwittingly landed in the middle of an international money scam after an unknown caller responded to his classified ad in the Deseret Morning News.
David Mason, 32, said he placed the ad in the newspaper hoping to sell his pool table for $500 and soon agreed to a deal with a man with an unusual accent.
"He said he was from Belgium but was in Salt Lake City just passing through and saw the ad," Mason said. "I thought that was a little weird, especially when he said he wanted me to ship the pool table to Belgium."
Mason said there were other strange signs. The man called seven times from seven different phone numbers and always limited the length of his calls. He also said he would send extra cash for shipping and insurance costs, but Mason wasn't prepared for how much extra money arrived Wednesday in the form of six postal money orders.
Each of the money orders was for $950, another red flag, although Mason didn't know it. Multiple scams use fraudulent postal money orders made out for between $900 and $1,000, the maximum amount of a postal money order, according to the U.S. Postal Service.
"I didn't even know you could go to the post office and cash these things in," he said.
Fortunately, he was skeptical. His parents called their bank and learned about the recent fraud involving counterfeit postal money orders. Then his father accompanied him to an Orem post office where they asked if the money orders were legitimate.
"If you haven't seen a postal money order before, you'd think these were real," Mason said. "But once the guy in post office put them up against a real one, there was no question they were fakes. They called the police."
Mason and his father, Dean, were glad Orem police officers understood they weren't trying to cash counterfeit money orders.
"My dad and I thought later we almost went to the slammer for something we didn't even know about," Mason said.
"We've seen this often enough we figured he was just duped," Orem Police Lt. Doug Edwards said. "It's happened a time or two now. We just want to make people aware, which people should be."
Police officers told Mason they wanted to catch the middle man, the person the Belgian supposedly would send to handle the shipping. Mason was supposed to take out his share of the money and give the rest of the $5,700 to the shipper.
The Belgian called about 30 minutes after Mason spoke with police and Mason told the man he had the money and that he could send the shipper. Instead, the Belgian asked him to send the money to him by Western Union. When Mason refused, the man swore at him.
"The police told me he was just going to pocket the money and never pick up the pool table," Mason said.
The U.S. Postal Inspection Service recently issued a warning about a similar money order scam on the Internet. In that scam, a person visits Internet chat rooms and asks someone to cash a money order and return the funds via wire transfer, promising that the helper can keep some of the money.
The scam is a variation on the well-known e-mail fraud where a person asks someone to cash a money order and send the funds overseas by wire.
An increase in the volume of counterfeit postal money orders was also reported in the last week in West Virginia and Kansas, according to news articles.
Some people have suffered losses when they deposit the money orders in their own bank accounts and send the money to the scam artist. Later, the bank rejects the counterfeit instruments.
To report fraud, call 1-800-372-8347 or visit www.usps.com/postalinspectors.
E-mail: twalch@desnews.com