Friday, May. 15, 2009

Pasco man takes fake money in Craigslist scam

By Paula Horton, Herald staff writer

PASCO -- Bruce Flippo knows he should have trusted his gut.

The west Pasco man was scammed out of $2,300 by two men who answered a classified ad for some power tools that the 52-year-old had posted on Craigslist.

Flippo followed the common-sense rules typically recommended when conducting transactions from online classified ad sites: He agreed to sell his items to men he met in person and he was paid in cash for all but $300 of the purchase.

But he still got scammed when he realized he received $2,000 worth of counterfeit $100 bills, and he wants to make sure no one else does.

"I thought that they probably were duping other people too," Flippo said. "I'm not a vindictive person. It was extra stuff sitting in my shop and it's not like I was desperate and need the money.

"But if people are aware there are counterfeit bills floating around," maybe they won't get scammed, he said.

The Franklin County Sheriff's Office collected the counterfeit money and is investigating. The suspects also appeared to have stolen the identity of a 61-year-old farmer in Warden.

Flippo accepted a $300 check for part of the purchase and when he realized the money was phony he called the man listed on the check. That's when he learned the men were using the Warden farmer's identity too, he said.

The suspects, who appeared to be in their early 30s, "looked like a couple of farm guys," so Flippo initially wasn't suspicious. One was 6-foot-3, 280 pounds with brown hair, while the other was 5-foot-10, 240 pounds with fair hair and a slightly red complexion.

And Flippo thinks the suspects likely scammed someone in Kennewick hours before he was hit Wednesday. While the men were loading the large tools into their red 1980s Ford flatbed truck, they told Flippo they had found the truck for sale on Craigslist and just bought it that day.

They told him they paid $1,500 for the truck and even showed him the title and bill of sale.

Flippo suspects they used counterfeit money to buy the truck, too, and has posted "BEWARE" ads online now in the section for tools and vehicles for sale.

Flippo sold the men a 50-ton heavy duty press and a vertical horizontal band saw that were new and just sitting in his garage, he said. While the men were there, they also saw some exercise equipment in the garage and offered to buy it for $300 if he'd let them write a check.

"I said, 'If it's good.' I didn't know the cash wasn't good," he said.

Flippo said he was a little suspicious about the money, but the men had it in a U.S. Bank envelope and told them they had gotten $4,500 from the bank earlier that day. They had $2,000 left and gave him the envelope full of cash.

He said he should have had them unload the items and just cancel the deal, but he decided to just let it go. When they left, he called his sister-in-law, who works at a bank, and realized the serial numbers on the bills were all the same.

Sheriff's Detective Lee Barrow said people conducting cash transactions should be wary, because there are counterfeit bills circulating in the area. Most fake bills are usually $20s or $100s.

Matching serial numbers and the quality of the paper can be telltale signs the money's not good, he said. Counterfeiters will also try to crumple the bills to make them look fairly used, he said.

"If you're getting a check, it doesn't hurt to actually get a form of valid ID from the person you're accepting it from," Barrow said.

Mike Blatman, Kennewick police's crime prevention specialist, said the best thing to remember when buying or selling items on Craigslist is "if it seems too good to be true, it is," and "buyer beware."

The common scams seen online are ones where buyers don't live near the seller, send a money order or check to them for over the amount of the agreed purchase price and ask the sellers to wire the extra money to them.

Offers for secret shopper jobs or work-from-home jobs are becoming popular scams, along with people under-valuing gift cards they have for sale, such as selling a $50 gift card for half what it's worth.

"You can almost guarantee if they're selling a gift card and it's under value, they've gotten the gift card illegally because there's no legitimate reason for them to be doing that," Blatman said.

The face-to-face scams like Flippo fell victim to are rare. In fact, a posting on Craigslist about scams says people will avoid "99 percent of the scam attempts on Craigslist" if people deal with buyers they can meet in person.

But, Blatman says, writing down identifying information -- vehicle description and license plate number -- when meeting someone in person can help law enforcement officers once victims realize they were scammed.