By MICHAEL A. FUOCO
Sunday, November 05, 2006
Relatively small, a March 26 classified advertisement in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette intrigued Ricky Sprague.
"Security Officer _ For Pgh. based corp. FT exc salary & benefits. Call HR Dept. 213-403-0415."
Sprague, 27, a former police officer and a security guard, had been looking for work and this seemed promising.
He called the Los Angeles number and a recorded message said a company was looking for security guards to work weekends at a luxury resort, all expenses paid, including weekly round-trip airfare, at a salary of $2,000 to $3,000 a month.
Now the job seemed almost too good to be true _ and, of course, it was.
After several telephone conversations with a man posing as an executive from "Island Resort Travel Club," Sprague complied with his request to wire $289 to cover part of the airfare to San Diego for an interview (where the expenditure would be reimbursed). Sprague complied, wiring the money and then calling to give the identifying number for the transfer.
He waited for the promised return phone call with his airline ticket confirmation number. And waited. And waited.
Sprague has many people with whom to commiserate _ from all over the United States and beyond. He is but one person caught in a slickly run, well-planned international scam in which hundreds of unemployed or underemployed people have had their desire to better themselves preyed upon.
The scam melds an old-school medium _ newspaper classified ads _ with the high-tech attributes of untraceable cell phones and prepaid calling cards, high-speed electronic wire transfers and the convenience, and anonymity, of automatic wire-transfer machines, similar to ATMs.
An investigation has shown the scam is centered in Orlando, Fla., but this is no Mickey Mouse operation. It's so sophisticated that Orlando police Detective Steve Wilson grudgingly admits his nemeses have outwitted him thus far. People are being lured by the seeming professionalism in the recorded message and in the telephone "interviews."
"Whoever is doing this is doing a really good job with it," he said. "I can guarantee that people are calling right now and there's not much that can be done to stop it.
"I have no video, no fingerprints, no eyewitnesses, no evidence."
What he hasn't lacked, since he began his probe last month, is victims. And the list is ever growing.
He became involved when a police department in Illinois contacted him to report several of its citizens had been scammed by sending wire transfers to Orlando.
He unearthed a crime spree that had begun by January 2005 or earlier. The victims hail from all over _ from Roanoke, Va., to Hawthorne, Calif., from Augusta, Kan., to Louisville, Ky., from Glen Burnie, Md., all the way to Russia. Detective Wilson said there's no way to estimate the number of victims but guessed he knows of only a fraction.
Generally, this is how the scam works: In newspapers across the country, classified ads have been placed offering jobs ranging from security guards to airline flight attendants to hospitality positions for private resorts. Several phone conversations take place and then the request is made to wire money, usually a figure just below $300, to a fictitious person in Orlando.
Among the aliases that have been used are John Mason, John Davis, John Holt, John Wells, James Ross, and Thomas Cassey.
In addition to contacting the victims, Detective Wilson is contacting the newspapers that have run the ads in an attempt to find who placed them.
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