ScamVictimsUnited.com

I am a student at WSU, since my lease ended in August/07 and my current roomate is moving out. I decided to post an ad on the web (my first ad ever) and in 3 days there was a respond from "Mary Edwards" who is from North Carolina, who worked as a charity worker in Nigeria, who plan to return and work on a degree in WSU.
We keep contact back and forth and she even ask for parking space, groceries stores, room dimensions, and distance to campus. So when all the informations are given, she said that she would fly back to US in a couple weeks to check out the room and she would foward me her last check to pay for deposite and room payment.

In 4 days a cashier's check arrives for $4800 and since everything is deducted the balance back is $4250 which I will return to her through WU (luckly WU did not accept my debit card for the reason that I forgotten to activated it and it uses my home phone). I was a bit careful so I deposited the check at WAMU and there was no problem and I decided to wait a day to see if the balance was real. Sure enough after a days wait, my balance is still fine. So I sent back the money which was splitted in 2 portions, one for her "travel agent" and the other for "Children shelter" each is $2000. After I send it I check my balance again and it is still fine for the the next three days.

After three days there is another E-mail stated that she had sent another check to again splitted the money in half one for the "hotel" and the other for "travel agent" again because of complications. Again I went to deposit the check at the bank after she even call my cell phone to check on the status of the check at which point I noticed her accent. However stupidly that I am I accept a reason in my mind that since she work as a charity worker in Nigeria she might have picked up the accent. By the time the teller tell me that this might be a fraud check, I was sweating and surely enough after 2 phone call to confirm the authencity of the check, it came back as fraud.

So after I contacted the police about the check, went home and check my balance sure enough the previous check had bounced so now I owed the bank $4250 and no roomate. I just wish that I had pay more attention to the news I saw 2 days before all this happen about the Nigerian fraud.

I am so sorry to hear that you have become a victim of this scam.

My first suggestion is to write up a detailed summary of what happened to you, including dates and times of conversations with the "roommate" and with all bank employees, then I would go to

http://scamvictimsunited.com/resources_ ... _check.htm

and and contact all of these places with that information.

Next, you have to decide if you want to try and work out a payment plan with the bank, or if you would like to try and fight them with the reason being that they should have caught this (WAMU knows about this scam, and you even said that when you went in with the second check the teller said it might be check fraud . . . why didn't the first teller catch it?)

Please let us know if there is anything we can do to help.