So my elderly mother last week was tricked into sending a large sum of money in the form of a cashiers check as a result of a scam run through facebook where basically a friend in her ward had her FB account cloned and then reached out to my mother under the guise of being her friend to get her to eventually send a large sum of money (you can see my previous posts for more details).

I found out that she had done this after the check had already been sent, fortunately my mom did not follow directions well and instead of overnighting it by FedEx she sent it 2-day USPS (turns out it gave us time to act).

After reaching out to her bank and involving several managers it turned out there was absolutely nothing the bank could do without having the check in hand. Here's the first lesson, cashiers checks cannot be cancelled even under the suspicion of fraud without having the check, those things are basically cash so once they are cut and mailed you are kind of out of luck.

The check was mailed to an address in Clovis New Mexico, I called the Clovis Police Department on Friday morning and they looked into it but ultimately told me that I would first need to file a police report out of my moms hometown here in Utah so we worked with the Sandy Police Department to gather all of the information, all of the FB Messenger messages, the friend whose account was cloned, the amount of the check, the name and address it was sent to in Clovis, the bank the check was cut from etc.

Turns out all of that was part of the process but the connection to CB actually winds up being the real difference in saving the day here. After initially posting this on CB I had several people reach out to me to offer some assistance so thank you to each of you but one of those individuals really stepped up (they know who they are and THANK YOU) and helped me to get some feedback from some different government resources. Based on this individuals help we were able to submit a USPS Intercept Service request and then this individual was able to work directly with the USPIS (United States Postal Inspection Service) which is the law enforcement arm of the Postal Service to jump in and have their contact out of the Clovis area make sure the letter was intercepted and sent back to my mother in Sandy. After waiting another 24 hours we finally received confirmation Saturday afternoon that this effort had been effective and they were able to prevent the letter from being delivered.

There is still follow up to be done with the police departments and frankly the likelihood of catching anyone is still very low, the more important thing though is that my mother will not be out this large sum of money. The Relief Society President in my mothers ward is also making the ward aware of what happened as this cloned account had friended approximately 25 other people in her ward.

At the end of the day almost anyone would have immediately recognized this message as a scam, I'd say 99.9% would know this was garbage but as it turns out this is really just a numbers game until they can find someone who is susceptible to this kind of stuff. Unfortunately my father who has always run the finances in their home has fairly severe dementia which has forced us to take over the finances and my mom, although working in the legal field for her entire career, had a significant brain trauma a few years ago and though she is better off than my dad she just is not as sharp as she was for most of her life. These guys are just out there looking for that small percentage of people who will fall for this crap, so even if it's only a tenth of a percent of people that may buy into this it still represents big money. Of course, the elderly are almost always the victims of these terrible crimes.

Thank you to those who stepped up to help, this was a significant amount of money for my mother and when she found out that the letter was not delivered I can report that there were plenty of tears of gratitude shed. She was ashamed, embarrassed, sad and angry and a million other emotions all mixed together so being able to stop this from happening was a big deal.

From my entire family, thank you for the help of this individual, CB is an AWESOME resource!