Ways We've Been Scammed

Many an expert in the field of law enforcement has stated that most scams go unreported, the general thought being that most people find admitting they've been gulled to be literally too humilating for words. Unfortunately for the scammers, Pam and I can't be embarrassed...we have been scammed far more than once...and we're here to talk about it.

That's the "inspiration" part.

As to format, a Hub without illustrations of any sort would be terribly boring and most likely remain unread. But, what way would be best to illustrate a Hub like this one? I chose to go with a series of self explanatory sketches: They get the point across, relieve the reader's boredom, but do not identify any individual or company as the perpetrator of a given scam. This is important why? After all, we have the documentation; any firm attempting to nail us in court for libel or slander would lose...dramatically. Well, unless a judge was in somebody's pocket. The reason this "disguised" method of illustration is important: To make sure HubPages.com is protected.

Thus the format.

And now: Our first example.

The battle in this world between good and evil is seldom portrayed more dramatically than in Pam's experience with a used car dealer we'll call XYZ Auto. This happened some time before the two of us met in Tonopah, Nevada, in 1996. She and a fellow who traveled with her had been homeless for some time when she finally convinced the Powers That Be that she really did need and deserve to receive a monthly disability check. Once the money came through, the first installment included several thousand dollars of retroactive back pay. She decided to use that one-time-only windfall to obtain reliable transportation. Enter XYZ Auto.

The vehicle she purchased with a huge down payment was a 1985 Chevrolet K5 Blazer with a convertible cap over the bed. Now she and her companion had a place to sleep and something better than a shopping cart in which to carry their belongings. All went relatively well with the truck...for five months. At the end of that time, the transmission--which had already begun making spooky noises and shifting roughly--issued one last, huge CLUNK! replete with clouds of smoke and a once-and-for-all lockup, going slower and slower until it would go no more.

XYZ Auto, although they'd already been paid more than the true retail market value of the Blazer, tried talking tough with my lady-to-be, demanding that she continue to make payments on the hunk of junk. Unfortunately for them, Pam has a rich and varied past, including some years as an auto mechanic as well as working in the front office for a major auto dealership. She advised them with considerable sound and fury that they were welcome to come tow their lemon from the side of the road, and if they wanted to take her to court, she would be more than willing--insistent, in fact--on proving to the judge that they had put sawdust in the transmission.

Which is illegal, something on the order of turning the speedomoter back. Gearheads have known for as long as there have been internal combustion engines that sawdust will quiet down a noisy transmission that is about to go boom. Temporarily. Very temporarily. Once the tranny had given up the ghost, all Pam had to do was pull the drain plug, and voila'! Sawdust! She never heard from XYZ Auto again, and as further proof of their guilt, her credit rating was never dinged for refusing to pay those final payments, either. In the end, they knew better than to tangle with the redhead in court.

But yup, she'd been had, and at the worst possible time. What depth of evil possesses anyone to take a homeless lady's last dollars in return for a faulty vehicle, knowing that in so doing, they have put her very life at risk? I have no idea. Don't want to know.

Wait. There is more. This one, The Case Of Attempted House Theft, has a happier ending.

A few years ago, Pam's eldest daughter called to ask for help. She and her hard working husband had bought a house and were about to fall behind on a payment. Could we cover them for one month?

Her timing was right on. At that time, we actually had some cash reserves (much unlike today), and fronting a payment to save a home for a close family member was well within our means. I sent the payment, figuring that was the end of it.

Not so. Before more than a couple of weeks had passed, the phone rang again: Mega Mortgage (the made-up name for this Hub), or MM, as in M-M-M, BAD, claimed the payment I'd sent had not been received. Although that made no sense, I immediately sent one more, just in case--we might get paid back for that one, or not. Either way, no big.

End of story? Um...not. Another week passed, with MM now claiming neither payment had been received, the homeowner was now two payments behind, and the mortgage company was seriously considering foreclosure proceedings. To say our daughter was panicked would be the understatement of the century. Pam and I were not panicked, but we did know we had a fight on our hands. Both payments had been sent as certified funds--bank checks--via Express Mail (U.S. Post Office), with tracking data that identified who in MM's branch office had received them, as well as when. Yet even armed with this information, and taking over the direct combat, I was getting nowhere with the folks on the phone.

Hmmmmm...... Looked like time to quit playing and declare war.

The whole thing was so hinky that my suspicions were aroused. Sure enough, a few hours of Internet searching turned up a class action lawsuit that MM had settled for many, many millions of dollars just six months prior to the problem we were facing. And--get this--the allegations against MM were specifically for insisting payments had not been received, followed by foreclosure and, literally, theft of the property from the unsuspecting homeowners.

Ah-Ha!

It took a bit more search engine work to unearth the name and email address of the MM Vice President in charge of handling stuff like this, but then we were ready. The unsuspecting fellow was hit with a barrage of emails requesting his assistance in resolving the problem. Accompanying that request were numerous questions and comments, such as:

Golly, that class action suit claimed MM went after low income people, especially those who didn't speak English well. Our daughter's problem couldn't have anything to do with her family having a non-Caucasian last name...could it? Oh, surely not. Oh, and did he know that the young wife's grandmother, now in her seventies, still worked in a dealership and threw so much auto loan business to MM that she'd even been recognized with a trip to National Headquarters and a bunch of fancy wall plaques?

There was more, but you get the idea. At first, Mr. V.P. couldn't seem to get that problem solved any better than I had without his help. But then...suddenly one payment was mysteriously uncovered; it had been "accidentally" put in a dead letter pile (of course). A week later, just as suddenly, the other payment turned up in much the same way.

That scam failed, thankfully...but the would-be perpetrators did give it the old college try. On the other hand, I've been on the short end of a few that did not fail...and they didn't even start out as deliberate scams. For instance, there was last autumn's Case Of The Vanishing Truck Loan.

In August of 2008, I was driving water trucks for a fine local trucking company in the gasfield drilling boom of western Colorado. As a driver, I was knocking down hefty wages--60 to 70 hours per week, straight night shift, nothing easy about it, but good money indeed. However, there was more to be made. Much more. Months of careful analysis had me convinced: Were I to purchase my own "bobtail" tanker truck (like the sketch, but with another set of axles under the back part)...and lease on to the same company as an owner operator rather than a company driver...I could expect to triple my gross and double my net.

The slump in the economy had not yet hit, and even after it did, the early stages worked for rather than against my employer. Only after I'd been thoroughly scammed and unable to purchase a truck at all did that company have to go into survival mode. For months, my original plan still seemed absolutely viable.

Except for one thing. The precise specifications for the truck I wanted were not that easy to come by. Anywhere near the gasfield, every bobtail tanker that turned up was snapped up immediately. Even so, with patience and--once again--a bit of Internet searching, on online broker found me a truck. It was located clear across the country from Colorado, but that really didn't matter. It had the required specs, the broker got me a loan approved, I'd wired the down payment to the requisite bank, and I was good to go. All that remained was to double check with the dealer, make sure the jake brake he had to add to the truck would be installed by the time I flew out to drive the rig back and put it to work.

Shucks, I was really ready, had even formed a one man Sub S corporation named Tryad Transport Inc. and obtained operating authority to haul water in the state of Colorado, jumped through nearly every hoop known to bureacracy (and that is saying something). So I called the broker, told him I needed his contact number at the dealership...and the other shoe fell.

Mr. Broker informed me that just that morning, the lender had shut their doors until at least after the election. Yes, my loan was approved. No, I couldn't go get the truck. Yes, I could ask for my down payment back, but all should be well in three weeks (this was mid-October).

For a while, albeit unhappily, I bought his story...for a little while. Mr. Broker's ongoing responses as we stayed in touch began to send up warning flags. To make a long story considerably shorter, we eventually discovered:

1. The lender had not said they would have funding after the election; they had notified everyone that they were shutting down at least until after the first of the year. (As of late March, their doors were still closed.)

2. The broker thus lied deliberately in an attempt to string us along and salvage the sale that was so near closing (48 hours) when it fell through.

3. The broker already knew of the problem prior to our sending the down payment to--not the lender's bank--but his bank.

4. Although he never admitted it, we told him--both Pam and I, as she had numerous conversations with him and had even gotten close to the man on some level--that we knew full well he was so broke he'd already spent the money.

In the end, that man once admitted to Pam on the phone that he lied to everybody but had made the mistake of "getting too close" to us. He lost his voice for weeks and had to have 17 polyps surgically removed from his throat. Bad karma for him, certainly, but nearly $3,000 down the tubes for us and an early demise for Tryad Transport Inc., the trucking company that never once took title to even a single truck.

Still, that was nothing dollar wise in comparison with The Saga Of The Bungling Developer.

When it comes to buying land financed by the owner, Pam and I have become relatively knowledgeable. Our remote Montana acreage was purchased that way in 1999, as was our present homestead in Arizona. The seller in Arizona, in particular, is one of the finest men to deal with we've ever met. In fact, when he heard about The Bungling Developer, the first words out his mouth were,

"You don't need to worry with me; I'm going to make up for what was done to you by---." And he has.

But the earlier guy, the villain of this segment? Ah, now there's a story!

In late 2005, Montana was killing Pam. Literally. Her health had been poor for years, but it was getting worse. To change that, we moved her down to Arizona into a motel with her adult son, Zach, taking over her daily care in my place. I retained my Montana residence that year but commuted to Arizona monthly as we set out to find Pam and Zach a long term place to live. I would be financing the project but did not intend to move to Arizona; I would commute "forever". Yeah. Right.

Anyway, we located an acreage a few miles from where we now live, eight acres off grid with owner financing. I paid --- something like $6,000 down and hustled to get the land ready to be a true home. A used but very nice mobile home was purchased for cash in Tucson. All it needed was new carpet, which Pam and I picked out together. We had the homesite leveled and the perc test done, ready to have a septic system installed.

But when it came time to move the mobile home, the karma hit the rotating whatsits. Firstly, the County refused a permit to move the home onto the land because they showed a mobile home as already being there. It was true; an old shell of a single wide had been parked there as a temporary place to junk the piece of junk. --- promised to get it out of there, all right, though we had to keep pushing at him...and then Zach uncovered the clincher.

He'd made a number of visits to the County Planning and Development office, trying to get the permit to move the mobile home and failing. The last time he tried, the clerk tossed him a new bombshell: Even with the offending junker mobile gone, they would not permit us to move ours onto the land. Why? They had "suddenly" noticed that --- had not properly subdivided the land in such a way as to make our purchase of that exact piece permissible. It would take six months to a year to clear up the problem!

As things stood, we couldn't wait that long. The motel was costing a monthly fortune, and Pam had been cooped up there for more than two months already. Zach found a place to rent, a nice house though not in the extreme off grid privacy both Pam and I prefer (and now have). And I did what I could to cut losses.

No cutting those losses when it came to ---. It soon became clear that only by accusing him of fraud and taking him to court would we have a chance of recovering those thousands...and there was no guarantee we'd even win. So I walked away from that one. The mobile home dealer was kind enough to buy back the trailer...at two thirds of what I'd paid for it a month earlier...and they got $3,000 worth of new carpet thrown in for free. Then there were the land improvements I'd already made, i.e. the perc test and leveling of the homesite.

Clearly, --- had not originally set out to defraud us any more than had Mr. Broker with the vanishing truck loan, but the result was the same. Total loss on the improperly subdivided land and mobile home: Roughly $25,000.

The experience did stand us in good stead this year: One man with land for sale in this area offered a four acre parcel, which was fine. He said he had several. Then he suddenly decided he wanted to sell them in six acre chunks. Red Light! This county does not generally permit rural subdivisions to chop things up into parcels smaller than four acres each. What did he do, add half of one to another? Smells like the story above. It even occurred to us that we are far from sure he even owned any land in the first place. So we cut him off. Perhaps we really do live and learn.

Let's close with one that worked out okay in the end, though it could have gone the other way.

When Pam and I moved in April of 2009 from western Colorado to southern Arizona, we knew we'd need long term storage for all of the household goods we were bringing along. Starting with nothing but bare land and a camp trailer, we still did not care to abandon the "stuff" we had acquired over the years. So I went online and found a 1970 Trailmobile semi trailer, a forty footer, and bought it sight unseen except for the online photo. The seller was an elderly gentleman, he had clear title, and all was well.

The move itself was pretty much Hell itself, well worth a separate Hub someday, but we did arrive on our newly purchased property right on schedule. The following morning, Sunday, April 19, 2009, I drove the eighty plus miles to Tucson to meet with both the seller--to pick up the title as well as the semi--and a tow truck which would transport the unit to our land. Arriving right on time and seeing the tow truck driver already circling the block, there seemed to be only one problem: No semi trailer, and no seller. We'd been scammed.

We reported the fraud to the Tucson police by telephone and dealt with the situation as best we could. A few phone calls arranged for three steel Rent To Own sheds to be delivered a few days later, and Zach came to the short term rescue in a magnificent way: He obtained permission from his father to let us unload the big U-Haul truck into a vacant mobile home sitting on his (the father's) land, and then proceeded to round up several of his (Zach's) friends to help with the unloading. He simply called, told them, "My Mom needs help," and they came running. By ten p.m. we had everything unloaded and were sleeping deeply, Pam in the wagon, me in the pickup.

That was Sunday. Late on Monday, well after five p.m., I got a call on my cell phone: It was the seller himself, checking in just moments after I'd realized we hadn't been scammed at all. I'd gone to the wrong place. When I found my misplaced notes, there were two addresses: One was where I'd sent the money in payment for the semi; the other was where the trailer and seller had been waiting for me and the wrecker to show up. I'd been just plain brain dead.

The following Saturday, we did take possession of the elusive semi. We also concluded privately that Mr. Seller had been tempted when I failed to show on the 19th of April. He had my cell number, and Pam's as well. Even if he forgot to carry it with him that day, as he later claimed--and as I actually did neglect to carry his because at that moment I couldn't find it--the delay of 36 hours was highly suspicious. What we think happened is that he fully intended to keep the money when I failed to show and that he would never have contacted us.

Except. Remember, we had filed a report with the police. Mr. Seller has two businesses in Tucson, so it's highly likely the PD knows him by name. Quite likely an officer gave him a jingle, told him, "Hey, these folks think you defrauded them; you might want to give them a call." Which he then did.

Nonetheless, all's well that ends well. Sure, the tires on the trailer are rotten to the max. So what? It's up on blocks anyway, isn't going anywhere now. On the other hands, early rains have shown us a couple of leaks in the roof....

Thanks for reading,

Ghost32