My wife and I decided we'd upgrade our 2003 Prius, which we love and have put almost 100,000 miles on, for a new bigger 2006 Prius. I decided I'd try and sell the car myself, and I put a combination ad in the WaPo and on cars.com.
Got a few bites, but no sales. Then I got a call from a guy in Minnesota who said he was interested, and made a reasonable offer. I told him at the time that I'd give him a call back in a week if none of the other prospects panned out. Then my mom died and we were gone for almost 2 weeks ...
When we got back earlier this week, I called the guy back to see if he was still interested, and we finished up negotiations and made the deal. He DHL'd me a cashiers check overnight last night. When I looked at the check on arrival it made me a bit suspicious .. the security features didn't look right and the printing looked like it was done with a 10 year old graphics dot-matrix printer. I called the bank it was purportedly issued by, and they told me that it was not one of their checks.
So, now I'm holding a bogus cashiers check for $9000 and this guy is surely going to call this evening and want to make arrangements for picking up the car. I immediately call the VA State Police and explain my situation to them. The woman on the other end said she'd have to figure out who handles that sort of problem and have them call me back. This is around noon.
A couple of hours go by, I'm reading about check fraud online (and not getting any work done) .. I finally call them back. An officer comes on, explains that they've referred it to a special agent and that he'd be getting in touch with me. I explain that I'm expecting the guy to call today, but the officer admits that it's friday afternoon and he's not sure I'll get a call today.
So, I decide to start calling around to various law enforcement agencies to see if anyone has any interest. MN State Police? Nope, please call the county. County police? Nope, please call St. Paul Municipal. Municipal? Nope, you should probably work with your local law enforcement people. But I've got an address for the guy!! Sorry, nothing we can do here without the bad check. Grrrrr ...
I next called Fairfax County (which is where the car is parked). They referred me to the Financial Crimes unit, where I'm informed that it will be at least 10 days before someone can get back to me.
OK, I'm really getting annoyed. I try the FBI office in DC, they refer me to USPS Fraud. USPS Fraud has an endless voice command system that was happy to give me lots of info on fraud but didn't seem to want to let me talk to a human. Tried the Secret Service. They admitted that they were the responsible agency. Yayyy! Then they tell me that although they'd love to go after the guy, the AG won't take a case for a silly $9K bogus cashiers check. Grrrrr.
Just got off the phone with VA State, where they told me that it really isn't their jurisdiction because the bad check was produced in MN.
Evidently I'm going to have to just tell this guy that his bank had some kind of problem with the check, and if he wants to get the car he should come out here with cash. He will then certainly decline, and go looking for someone else to scam ... this really sucks