World of Pageantry

Please be advised that a ring of people is targeting churches and other organizations including High School Band Boosters in the Riverside area who offer Scrip.

Several organizations have already been victimized.

The story goes like this:

The person contacting you is a relative of a member or supporter of your program. They are a realtor and they use the gift cards to give out to clients. They may show up at your practice or e-mail you. They will order several hundred dollars and try to pay with a check. The check is drawn on a Realtor's Account (like Century 21) or may be a personal check.

The problem is that the checks are fake.

Just wanted to pass this on as information is power.

Sorry to hear that you were scammed, especially in these harsh economic times. Hopefully, you can recover some of the money or better yet, catch the people responsible.

It seems to be the case of "if you build a better mousetrap, they will build a better mouse." Scammers are always changing their techniques in order to avoid detection. One relatively easy method of deterring check scams is to require that the payer produce a valid id. Sure, there are fake ids out there but, someone who it targeting a high school program is probably counting on the fact that there is considerable trust in the band-world.

I know this is a little late ,but our Booster program went o 100% automatic check deductions on the website, no cash or check changes hands it all is done over the web with the script company and it makes the accounting part very easy as the script company deducts the cost and automatically deposits the profit into our account. We do have one corporate account that does write checks that we still allow although this does make me nervouse if the corp goes belly up on us. Happy Fund raising.