Posted by Elissa Burnell on
A scammer from overseas almost gets a local woman put behind bars. Bluff City police tell us the FBI is now involved in a check cashing con that could have cost a Tri-Cities woman her freedom.
*A scammer from overseas almost gets a local woman put behind bars.
Bluff City police tell us the FBI is now involved in a check cashing con that could have cost a Tri-Cities woman her freedom.
According to Dawn Frazier, "it's hard to meet a man out there when you're a single mom because kids seem to steer men the opposite direction."
Dawn Frazier is a single mother of a 6-year-old boy and she began using an internet dating service in the hopes of finding the man of her dreams.
Instead she found a man who almost ended up taking all her dreams away.
"I fell for a line of bull basically. He told me exactly what he knew I wanted to hear and I was naïve enough to believe everything he told me," says Frazier.
After a few months of talking to a man she knew only as "Ray", Frazier was asked to help him cash his payroll checks...that was in late June.
By the beginning of July when Frazier went to this bank to collect the money and send it back to "Ray", employees here told her the police wanted to speak with her.
Says Bluff City Police Chief Ken Potter, "we always have folks that fall for it, until they're able to resist the temptation of people conning them into doing something, we will always have these types of crimes."
And it's not hard to get taken in...any one of us could be at the computer -- anywhere in the Tri-Cities -- in a chat room, instant messaging and you're hooked.
Frazier's first interview could have ended in an arrest but police decided to wait one more day and have her help with the investigation...that's when they realized that she had been taken too...and had never meant to try and take anyone's money.
She says, "I've prayed more in the past 2 weeks than I ever have."
Adds Potter, "no one is just going to give you money and if you fall for these things you're going to be a crime victim."
Frazier says she still hasn't told anyone outside the police department what she's been going through...not her son, or her mother. But she wanted to share her story to keep it from happening to someone else.
We did some checking...and Johnson City, Kingsport and the Bristols tell us forgeries and frauds have risen exponentially in the last 5 to 10 years as computers and printers have gotten more advanced.