A local screen printing business is sitting on about $1,600 in what looks like fraudulent money after apparent con artists tried scamming them, and the business owner is frustrated that officials don’t have much help to offer.
Around Thanksgiving, Brainless Tees in Vancouver received an email order for a few hundred screen-printed T-shirts.
Jesse Conley, a clerk at the business, said the customer wanted 420 shirts printed, and that he’d provide the shirts.
Most of it seemed pretty normal, Conley said. The customer paid the $1,600, but then he asked for another favor: A new invoice, for $2,500 — with a $40 tip to Conley — and to ship the goods via a private courier.
“That one right there, honestly, that’s what set the flag off,” he said.
The buyer wouldn’t be straight about a shipping address, and it seemed odd they’d want to pay about six times as much by using a private courier, said Adam Funderburg, Brainless Tees’ owner.
The buyer wouldn’t talk on the phone and claimed he was in the hospital for a lung surgery, so Conley and Funderburg started stalling.
Conley said they tracked down the card information to a man who runs a garlic farm in Gilroy, Calif.
“That’s really random to have this guy in a town of 53,000, in the farming part of California,” Conley said, adding that the scammers likely opened an account somewhere using some of the California man’s personal information.
They called the California man, and he said he’d made no such order, and his bank saw no discrepancies.
Brainless Tees spoke to police a couple of times in the past several days, Funderburg said.
“I explained to her that there were a bunch of red flags on this one. We don’t get too many people contacting us completely out of the blue from Gilroy, Calif., wanting a bunch of shirts that are affiliated with nothing at all,” he said.
Complicating any investigation, Conley and Funderburg said, was the fact no actual victims had been found, and no one can find a bank attached to the card.
Kim Kapp, The Vancouver Police Department’s spokeswoman, said that doesn’t mean a victim won’t be found later.
“Sometimes people don’t check their statements for months,” she said in an email. “So it can take time to determine fraud victims unless they come forward.”
Funderburg and Conley went to Mastercard, who handled the debit card the supposed customer used, but the company said it was out of their hands.
They were told Mastercard oversees the systems behind the use of the card, not the money and accounts affiliated with it, Funderburg and Conley said.
They also contacted their credit card administrator, Stripe, who said that although the circumstances were dubious, the record of the transaction was technically clean, Funderburg said.
Conley said he’s heard of scams other screen printers have seen that appear similar:
The customer would and have the business send the shirts using a private courier. Then, the supposed customer would reroute the courier and feign a problem in the shipping process, and demand a refund or cancel the invoice.
The grifters end up with the goods to resell, and, possibly, the cash. Or, the money is recognized as fraudulent by a bank or other cog in the process, Funderburg said, and the business loses it or is otherwise penalized.
He said a scammer tried doing something similar to him several months ago. The buyer ordered a thousand shirts, with no printing, and asked for them to be shipped via courier.
Funderburg’s shirt supplier asked if he knew the buyer personally, because that seemed like the only way this wasn’t a scam. Had they gone through with it, Funderburg said, they’d be out the money and the shirts.
Until someone can do something, he’s sitting on money that might be stolen and will likely screw up his books, and he’s frustrated that no one, from the banks to the police, seems especially animated about it.
“The fact that we’re throwing up alarms and saying there’s something wrong with this purchase — we’ve got the email chains, we’ve got the purchase, and nobody cares,” Conley said. “Even when somebody’s being told that a scam is going on.”
