Ferry pilot SCAM

ntbjounin

ntbjounin

Pre-takeoff checklist
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Display name:
Jounin
So I ferry aircraft on the side when I can. I really enjoy it.

I had a guy contact me a few weeks before xmas about ferrying his A33 Debonair from somewhere near Chicago to Boston.

We traded emails for a few weeks, planning, and so on... He was to send me a pre-payment of $500. Delay delay delay....

The check finally comes. The fedex I received came from Houston, the check from Atlanta, from some company I've never heard of... However, the check is for $2500. Memo : INSTANT CASHING The tracking # he gave me was for some package in Pittsburg.

There was a generic note inside the envelope... Email this guy when you get the check, blah blah blah.

Yea, right... Like I'm going to do that. So obviously, this is a check scam where I'm supposed to deposit their check for $2500 and send them back a check for $2000. Hah, if they only knew.... I dont have $2000! lol Of course, I'd have $2000 fewer dollars if I fell for this scam.

I got a phone call at 5am from some guy with an accent. I just told him wrong number. I'm annoyed....

Anyone here know how i can give the check, note and envelope and emails to some authorities? Any fraud police on the site? I contacted the FTC.... They could care less... They took my report, were extremely rude, and didnt give a crap. They wont do anything on it.

The strangest part of this in my opinion was how knowledgeable he was about airplanes. His emails were very believable.

Be aware out there. People are jerks!
 
Ya know, if anyone gets caught by one of these "advance payment" scams, it's almost Darwinian in my view.

"Oops, I sent you too much money. Can you just cash it and send me back the excess?"

A fool and his money...

That said, it never hurts to give a heads-up that there's another of these making the rounds.
 
ntbjounin said:
So I ferry aircraft on the side when I can. I really enjoy it.

I had a guy contact me a few weeks before xmas about ferrying his A33 Debonair from somewhere near Chicago to Boston.

We traded emails for a few weeks, planning, and so on... He was to send me a pre-payment of $500. Delay delay delay....

The check finally comes. The fedex I received came from Houston, the check from Atlanta, from some company I've never heard of... However, the check is for $2500. Memo : INSTANT CASHING The tracking # he gave me was for some package in Pittsburg.

There was a generic note inside the envelope... Email this guy when you get the check, blah blah blah.

Yea, right... Like I'm going to do that. So obviously, this is a check scam where I'm supposed to deposit their check for $2500 and send them back a check for $2000. Hah, if they only knew.... I dont have $2000! lol Of course, I'd have $2000 fewer dollars if I fell for this scam.

I got a phone call at 5am from some guy with an accent. I just told him wrong number. I'm annoyed....

Anyone here know how i can give the check, note and envelope and emails to some authorities? Any fraud police on the site? I contacted the FTC.... They could care less... They took my report, were extremely rude, and didnt give a crap. They wont do anything on it.

The strangest part of this in my opinion was how knowledgeable he was about airplanes. His emails were very believable.

Be aware out there. People are jerks!
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Write him back and say you'll draw against the balance for your expenses, and please let you know where to pick up the plane.
 
"Thanks for the tip. People don't usually tip for ferrying, that was unexpected. So, where do I pick up the plane?"
 
Like the check would ever clear...

...JOOC, have you called the bank on which the check is drawn to ask if (1) the account is legit, and (2) if the funds are there?

I bet (not knowing in advance) tha the check is labeled "Cashier's Check," and it's faker than TSA security.
 
Steve Foley said:
Write him back and say you'll draw against the balance for your expenses, and please let you know where to pick up the plane.
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That won't work. The check is no good and you will be subject to bank fees and potential legal action for depositing a bad check.

-Skip
 
Skip Miller said:
That won't work. The check is no good and you will be subject to bank fees and potential legal action for depositing a bad check.

-Skip
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I certainly wouldn't cash the check until I had possession of the aircraft. At that point, it would develop a mechanical issue and would be left in the care of a mechanic. OH, by the way, the check bounced, so the mechanic has a lien on your plane.

Check ownership of the plane first.
 
We went through this when someone managed to get check with our company name on them and wrote a buttload of them all over tarnation.

There is NO ONE and I mean NO ONE that will help on an issue like this. We had evidence of the perp, who sued their own name and home address, we have check printing companies that had static IP addresses billed to scammer's business in Alabama and the list goes on and one...

Postal inspector laughed and hung up the phone.
Locale detectives said call detectives at one of the locations where the checks came from

They said call local detectives.
FBI said they only do terrorism

Basically I learned that I was on my own...We ended up getting the gal arrested and charged with a few felony counts of uttering or something to that effect.

Now I will have to fly to Alabama to go to trail.
 
Kelvin said:
Now I will have to fly to Alabama to go to trail.
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Which trail in Alabama are you going to? I am not familiar with Alabama hiking... :D:D:D

Seriously though, what a pain! Sorry you have to deal with it. Some people just need to be drug in the street and beat down.
 
Skip Miller said:
That won't work. The check is no good and you will be subject to bank fees and potential legal action for depositing a bad check.
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While banks can charge a reversal fee if you deposit a bad check, I don't believe they can institute any other legal action unless they can show you "knowingly uttered" the bad check, and in this case, that might be hard to prove. The cat who sent you the check, yes, but not you.
 
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EdFred said:
Au contraire...let me find the article...

Found it:
http://articles.sfgate.com/2006-08-30/business/17308300_1_craigslist-bofa-bogus-check
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Yeah, and did you read the whole thing, including this part?
BofA calls the bizarre episode "an unfortunate series of events" and says that "clearly and without equivocation Bank of America regrets what occurred." But the bank says it was only doing its duty by notifying the cops when a bad check surfaced.
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I'll bet that if you research that case further, there was at least a major league apology by both the bank and the police, and possibly payment of damages.
 
Ron Levy said:
Yeah, and did you read the whole thing, including this part?
I'll bet that if you research that case further, there was at least a major league apology by both the bank and the police, and possibly payment of damages.
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But not major enough to reimburse the guy the $14k he spend on defending himself, nor the embarrassment, of being cuffed at his bank. The bank was NOT doing it's duty as far as I am concerned.
 
EdFred said:
But not major enough to reimburse the guy the $14k he spend on defending himself, nor the embarrassment, of being cuffed at his bank. The bank was NOT doing it's duty as far as I am concerned.
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Within 24 hours the district attorney's office dropped all charges against Shinnick.
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How did he manage to spend $14K in legal fees in 24 hours?
 
Arizona takes bad checks very seriously. I saw a lot of legal notices everywhere in Lake Havasu about "all bad checks will be prosecuted as fraud."
 
Because it involves interstate trade (FedEx, etc) contact the FBI. If US Mail was involved, they REALLY are interested.
 
Steve Foley said:
How did he manage to spend $14K in legal fees in 24 hours?
Click to expand...

Sounds like he went to court to get his record cleared:

"In July a San Francisco Superior Court judge ruled that Shinnick was innocent by 'findings of fact' -- a decision that essentially erases all record of the case."
​
 
You might try contacting the State Attorney General's office, or the Secret Service if you think the check is counterfeit (most likely). Problem is since most of these originate in foreign countries, making it hard for any Federal, Local or State law enforcement agency to truly prosecute them.
 
SkyHog said:
Arizona takes bad checks very seriously. I saw a lot of legal notices everywhere in Lake Havasu about "all bad checks will be prosecuted as fraud."
Click to expand...

The county attorneys are empowered to establish bad check programs to prosecute people who pass bad checks and fail to make good on them and obtain restitution for the victims. Here's Pima County's: http://www.pcao.pima.gov/badcheck.htm
 
Ron Levy said:
Doesn't say he never got that back later.
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Actually on the first page it says
It also says Shinnick has no grounds to sue for thousands of dollars in legal costs because of a 2004 state Supreme Court decision that shields institutions and people from liability when reporting suspected crimes to the police.
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and then later the article states

BofA felt otherwise. Earlier this month a bank vice president William Minnes wrote to Shinnick's lawyer to say that "Bank of America can certainly understand that your client is angry at the bank."
However he said BofA has no legal liability in the case because of the 2004 Supreme Court ruling. Minnes warned that "litigation would not prove financially beneficial" to Shinnick.
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It would be an easy conclusion to say that he is out the money.
 
Ron Levy said:
So we really don't know, do we?
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I don't...but you recently made a big stink about some TSA actions possibly not being true because you didn't like the sources that were provided. You asked for a source, it was given, and you take a stance that he may not have lost money from it with no references at all.

I find your stance in this thread hypocritical given there is NO source to back it, and you asked for a source when it was mentioned that Shinnick spent $14,000 to clear his name. You are making an appeal to ignorance here...stating "you don't know that he wasn't made whole, therefore he mist have recovered the $14,000"

I'm am not saying he wasn't repaid (or that he was) as I don't know, but you don't know either.

The data available to is is that he was arrested, sent to jail, and had to pay $14,000 to clear his name. These are all things that shouldn't happen to anyone under the circumstances cited in the source.
 
It doesn't matter if the poor bast*.. legally clears his name. His arrest is front page news; his winning his case is a footnote on page 12. All anyone will remember is his arrest.
Happens that way with people accused of sexual assaults. It's not the final outcome anyone remembers.
All he's got to show for his efforts is $14k in legal fees and no joy.
 
Ron Levy said:
While banks can charge a reversal fee if you deposit a bad check, I don't believe they can institute any other legal action unless they can show you "knowingly uttered" the bad check, and in this case, that might be hard to prove. The cat who sent you the check, yes, but not you.
Click to expand...

Oh ... I don't think so. A few years back when BofA had the dude
arrested for trying to deposit a check someone gave him I canceled
my AOPA credit card because I refused to do business with a bank
that treated their customers like that. I informed both BofA and AOPA
why .. and neither gave a rat's hind end. There was considerable online
discussion of the situation.

RT
 
there was a restaurant near my hometown that had the front window, right out by the door, covered in bad checks. facing outward. good deterrent. probably illegal.
 
tonycondon said:
there was a restaurant near my hometown that had the front window, right out by the door, covered in bad checks. facing outward. good deterrent. probably illegal.
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Why would it be illegal?
 
publicly posting the names of people who have written bad checks in the past. not to mention i suppose their bank routing numbers and account numbers were on the cancelled checks.
 
tonycondon said:
publicly posting the names of people who have written bad checks in the past. not to mention i suppose their bank routing numbers and account numbers were on the cancelled checks.
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Guess they should have thought about that before passing bad checks.
 
It's of course possible that they didn't know that the check was bad. They expect a direct deposit of their paycheck. They don't verify that it made it into the account properly (or the company screws up and reverses the deposit afterwards) and suddenly they're bouncing a check when they fully expected sufficient funds to be available.

Now, if it happens more than once, then they're just stupid and may deserve it.
 
I did interim CEO turn-around work for a few years before tiring of the eternal hair-pulling that they entail. On one such assignment, we bounced a check because the bank decided a fed funds wire transfer they received the day before didn't rise to their test of "good funds" for purposes of allowing checks to be drawn against the account. So we had about a million in the bank, and about 250k hot check to a supplier against it.

The bank called to tell us about the hot check, and I already knew they had screwed the pooch on the fed funds wire transfer (FYI, when you get funds through the federal reserve wire transfer system, they're good funds and that's all there are to it) so when the bank president lady called to ***** about the hot check, I stopped her in her tracks by asking how many days during the past year my company had maintained a positive balance. She reviewed the account records and replied that today was the only one. So I then asked if I called her every day to be sure we had a positive balance. She said no, she didn't think I had. So I then asked her why she was calling to give me hell on the only day during the year we didn't have a positive balance, and told her I didn't appreciate her nitpicking approach after all the days we had maintained a positive balance.

About an hour later two guys from the bank showed up, said the president was concerned that the company was being managed by an unbalanced person and wanted to be sure we were still operating normally.

So I sat their young assistant vicepresident asses down in my office and splained to them how wire transfers work, and that the bank has no right to place a hold on those deposits and that they needed to get their ass back over to their HQ and get it fixed before the close of business. And they did.
 
wabower said:
So I sat their young assistant vicepresident asses down in my office and splained to them how wire transfers work, and that the bank has no right to place a hold on those deposits and that they needed to get their ass back over to their HQ and get it fixed before the close of business. And they did.
Click to expand...

Communication can be a wonderful thing.
 
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