From the editor: Scam artists never take a day off

It’s an old story, but you’re going to keep hearing it because it needs to be told: Scam artists are out to get you.

Three of four stories that came to light this week stretched beyond the usual targets in Green Valley. But let’s start with a familiar scam right here and work our way north.

On Wednesday, a Green Valley woman received a call from somebody she thought was her grandson.

He said he’d been arrested in Canada and needed $2,800 to get out of jail. She needed to wire the money.

The woman went to the Western Union office in the Safeway at Continental Shopping Plaza, according to a Pima County Sheriff’s Office report, and tried to send the money. The alert WU clerk questioned her and recognized it was a scam. She encouraged the woman to call authorities.

The woman returned home and called the PCSO and was told about the scam. As for her grandson, he was home in bed the entire time — and not in Canada. Scam averted.

On Thursday, I received a call from Sahuarita Police Officer Ron Zimmerling, who told me the following stories, all involving Craigslist, the popular online classified ad service.

In two cases — one from Rancho Sahuarita, the other in Quail Creek — victims posted ads for furniture. In both cases, they had interested buyers and went back and forth with them via e-mail several times. The “buyer” then sent a check that far exceeded the amount of the purchase. In one case, they sent $2,500 for a $900 couch. In the other, it was $2,000 for a $250 couch.

The victim notified the “buyer” and was told to go ahead and deposit the check and write the buyer a check for the difference. In the first case, the Rancho victim sent back $1,600. Later, the victim learned the original $2,500 check didn’t clear (you saw that coming).

In the second case, the target, from Quail Creek, didn’t take the bait and lost nothing.

In the final story, Zimmerling said somebody who’d struck a deal to buy a truck from a seller on Craigslist sent money via Western Union and never received the vehicle.

Craigslist connects buyers and sellers — often hundreds of miles apart — and lets them work out the deal. You can report a scam, but don’t count on getting your money back. Best advice: Meet in person with potential buyers.

The car scam sounded awfully familiar to me. We were looking for a car for our daughter last year and I contacted several sellers via Craigslist. Several of the ads were “too good to be true” and were dumped from Craigslist after I helped expose them as scams. (My favorite was a guy who said he was in Ohio, though in the car’s photos I could clearly see the reflection of palm trees...) Frankly, it was scary trying to buy a car in that environment. We gave in to tradition (and maybe some guilt, since I’m a newspaperman) and used the newspaper’s online classifieds. We met a seller face to face and struck the deal.

— Dan Shearer