Just minding my own business yesterday, when I get a phone call out of the blue. Here's a paraphrase of what was said.

"This is so-and-so from the Tuscola County Michigan DA's office. Our investigation shows you were involved in an online scam with one Fran Edwards."

It took me a moment to register what she was talking about. I didn't do anything! Then it all came together pretty quickly.

You see, back in 2002, we decided to buy a Playstation 2 for my son (and myself) for Christmas. Being the frugal stewards of our finances we are (sometimes), we decided to look around for the best deal. I happened upon a fairly new website, sell.com. We found a great deal on a PS2, one that was good, but not to-good-to-be-true. We communicated back and forth with the seller, asking many questions and we were put at ease by the responses. The seller did everything right, especially because she insisted on keeping our communication only through sell.com so there would be a “record of our communication."

We ordered the PS2 and planned to pay for it with a money order as another layer of safety. We tracked the shipment from Michigan, taking note that the shipping weight was in the range expected for a PS2. This made us even more confident with the purchase.

A few days later, the UPS truck arrived, delivered the package, and we handed over the money order. For whatever reason, we were still a bit nervous about the transaction, so we literally ripped into the box to see our purchase.

It was a ream of paper.

I was flabbergasted, my wife was mad, and my son started crying. The UPS driver was still in the driveway, so we caught him, and explained what had happened. He explained that "officially" there was nothing he could do, but he sympathized with us, took the package back, and returned our money order.

Meanwhile, I jumped on the phone and called the seller, much to her surprise. Internet sleuths that we are, we had already tracked down her real name and address based on the phone number that she had provided us early on, so we knew exactly where she lived. I was overly dramatic on the phone (and quite sarcastic) when I nearly yelled at her, "You sent a pack of paper. You ruined my son's Christmas." I made sure I held the phone close enough they could hear my son crying. She, of course, denied any problem, insisting that someone at UPS must have stolen the unit. Yeah right.

Problem is, as my wife informed the seller after taking over the phone, the ream of paper was wrapped in newspaper from Marietta, MI—her town. We informed her we were calling her local police.

As soon as we got off the phone with her, we logged back onto the sell.com website to warn her other buyers that she was a fraud. Some still lost money, but there were a few who were warned in time. There was also a run-around with UPS for the next couple of days (we actually got the driver in trouble because it was against their policies to take a package back once delivered), but we got it all sorted out and ended up not losing any money. I went to Wal-Mart that day and bought a PS2 for full price. Lesson learned.

We spent the next few days on the phone with authorities in Michigan, giving them the details of the scam. One of the officers in Marietta that my wife spoke to said that the local authorities knew all about Fran Edwards’ scams (they knew she’d been scamming people for upwards of a year), but that she was “out of their jurisdiction” so they couldn’t actually do anything about it. (Since it was a computer crime, everyone kept passing the buck. Did the crime occur in the sender’s state or in the victim’s state?)

The officer told my wife that although they couldn’t arrest Fran for defrauding people, they did, on a regular basis, ask Fran personally (unofficially) to return money to her victims that had contacted their police department. And Fran would actually walk into the police department and hand over the money to the officers! She was completely OK with returning the money because only a small percentage of her victims ever contacted the police about being scammed; most just contacted their credit card companies to get reimbursed for their loss.

Shortly after we spoke with the police in Michigan, we learned that the DA in Michigan was finally going to prepare a case against Fran Edwards for her months and months of fraud.

That was five years ago, and we hadn’t heard anything else about it until yesterday. The DA on the phone was tracking all those who had been scammed by this woman and finding out how much each had lost. We are out nothing, so no big deal other than our testimony in the case.

Come to find out, this woman, Fran Edwards, had been on the run for a little while and was finally apprehended after her story was profiled on the America’s Most Wanted website, and featured as a fugitive on a TV episode in February. Apparently Fran had fled from authorities when she knew that she was finally going to be charged, but friends of Fran’s turned her in after they read the story on AMW; they couldn’t believe that a friend of their could be so dishonest!

Crazy.

Popularity: 5% [?]