Woman conned in Net scam

It sounded like a great idea just days before, when Susie Lee met a new friend in an Internet chat room last fall. All she had to do was deposit some of his money into her bank account and she’d get enough cash out of the deal from him to pay some bills — and at a time when she was unemployed. She’d met the man on a Thursday. But by Monday she knew she’d been scammed when the checks he’d written her were phony.

Lee, 36, wired the man more than $8,000, and he kited two checks for $17,900, Huntington Beach Det. Dave Humphreys said.

“I checked to see if the deposits were made, and they were,” Lee said. “I never checked to see to see if they cleared.

“On Monday, I knew that I got [ripped off].”

It all started after she had gotten laid off from her job in mortgage banking. Lee found she had a great deal of time on her hands.

“The only thing I had was access to my computer,” she said.

In their online chats, the alleged crook told Lee that he was from San Jose and purchased cars at auctions for sale overseas, mostly in Europe. During their online conversations, heoffered up information that led Lee to believe he legitimately was in the car business, she said.

He also asked for her legal advice on how to hide his money so that his wife’s attorney could not find it. He wanted a partner to help him avoid alimony.

That weekend, the grifter called Lee sounding panicked. He said he was at an auction in Nevada and that his assistant had made off with $15,000 he needed to acquire a car he was sending to his parents in France.

“He had me believing his assistant was skimming money from him,” Lee said.

Continuing in his panicked voice, he said he was going to miss the boat, Lee said. He said things to her like the car was supposed to go to his father’s friend and how he was so “embarrassed” already being the “black-sheep” of the family, Lee added.

“He said, ‘Do you have any bills you need paid off?’ ” Lee said. Then he asked her if he could deposit his money in her account to keep it safe. He promised Lee $5,000 to pay off credit card bills if she could wire him money he had already deposited into her account — or so she thought. She had already paid off some of her debt by that Monday morning.

“They make you think you are going to make something out of it,” Humphreys said. “And the money was already sitting in your account, so you think.”

Lee sent two $2,500 wires through MoneyGram and another for $3,140 from Western Union, Humphreys said.

The Western Union wire was retrieved in Zephyr Cove, Nev., a town just outside of South Lake Tahoe, Humphreys said.

The two MoneyGram wires were addressed to someone in Freemont. Where the money was actually picked up is unknown, he said.

Lee called police that Monday, reporting her loss. Since then, she has continued to call the cellphone number given to her by the grifter. Her calls went straight to voicemail every time. Last week, the number was disconnected, Lee said. According to police, the phone was a prepaid account.

Through five separate search warrants, Humphreys tracked down two Internet Protocol addresses to two residences in South Lake Tahoe, Nev., and a cellphone. One IP was traced to San Jose.

“It doesn’t mean they were the ones on the other side of the computer,” Humphreys said.

Humphreys contacted authorities in both cities, passing along the information he attained with the search warrants. While working with San Jose Police, he found a detective there who recently received a similar case that led to the same residential address, Humphreys said.

“This guy was so sly,” Lee said. “I really felt like I knew this person.”

But so far, investigators do not have a suspect. Lee’s plight, though, offers at least a cautionary tale.

Humphreys advises residents to never give out bank information, to be wary of strangers asking you for any such information and to continually monitor your credit reports. It takes months — even years — to track down records and recover from such a financial setback.