Posted by Frank Gray on
Don McClure will tell you he knows a lot about fraud. When he was a kid in Brooklyn, N.Y., he got busted for running numbers, he said. But he gave that up and for 30 years now has run a prison ministry called Someone Cares.
Don McClure will tell you he knows a lot about fraud. When he was a kid in Brooklyn, N.Y., he got busted for running numbers, he said. But he gave that up and for 30 years now has run a prison ministry called Someone Cares.
Working in prison, he says, he's seen the worst of the worst and dealt with the most devious, persuasive con men you'll find anywhere.
So McClure, who lives in Fort Wayne, has learned to be wary, the kind of guy who's hard to scam. For example, he knew better when he received an e-mail from a person claiming to be a rich businessman who wanted to contribute $5,000 to his ministry - if he would agree to transfer $3,000 of it to a church in Nigeria. He knew any check he got would be bogus, and any money he forwarded would go anywhere but a church.
Sometimes, though, it can be fun to play along when someone's trying to scam you. So McClure did something most of us wouldn't try. When he got one of those Nigerian scam e-mails (we have $38 million in deposits belonging to a dead man and will split it with you if you help us get it out of the country) he played along. In fact, for several months now, he's been stringing along four or five of the con artists.
He's gotten copies of what are supposed to be legal documents explaining the distribution of an estate, letters authorizing the release of $14.8 million to him and letters asking that he make payments ahead of time to help grease the skids to get the money out of the country.
McClure has played along, always asking a lot of questions, expressing concerns here and there, and then refusing to send money, saying he wouldn't send anybody anything until he got some money.
The result has been a lot of money - all in the form of counterfeit checks and money orders. In one case, he rejected the idea of wiring cash to someone and demanded he be sent $25,000 first.
'And I got a check for $25,000," McClure said, showing off a copy he got from his bank. 'Of course it's no good." It was a counterfeit check written on Bank of America, and it took three weeks for McClure's bank to establish that it was counterfeit, even though he told them it probably was from the start.
Another con artist sent him five $1,000 money orders, all U.S. Postal Service money orders. He took those to the bank, too, and warned that they were probably fakes, which they were.
McClure acknowledges what he's doing could be dangerous. It could put him in harm's way if he strings along the wrong person. He knows that there's no way of telling where the con artists are, whether they're in Nigeria or Canada or Florida or down the street. 'There is a risk factor. These people kill people."
This isn't a game or a hobby to McClure, though. What he's doing is collecting evidence of active scams and counterfeit checks and money orders in the hope that the information might be of use to the FBI.
He has even spent nearly $150 making phone calls to Nigeria to play the game, 'only because I thought someone would get caught." But the FBI, he says, doesn't seem particularly interested.
Everybody is getting these scam proposals in their e-mail - bogus business deals, get-rich-quick schemes, lottery schemes, he says. 'I'm getting them; you're getting them; your neighbor is getting them.
'Nobody gives a hoot, and people are getting burned."
The people who are getting burned are often the greedy, he says.
'Everyone is greedy," McClure says. 'The greediest believe it" when they get a come-on in their e-mail.
To illustrate his point, McClure said he has played some tricks on his friends, sending them proposals and then letting them know it's all a prank. 'You'd be stunned how gullible people are," he says.
We asked the FBI about McClure's concerns, and his frustration that no one seems to give a hoot.
Wendy Osborne, a special agent with the FBI in Indianapolis and a spokeswoman for the agency, didn't want to sound alarmist but acknowledged that there is the potential for dangerous consequences. One never knows where a con man really is.
Meanwhile, Osborne said, people can file complaints about scams on a government Web site, www.ic3.gov . This allows the FBI to sort through the millions of scams floating around in cyberspace and possibly track down their source.
The best solution, though, is just to delete e-mails promising millions of dollars in payoffs, lottery winnings, business opportunities and so on.