Overpayment to Charity Scam Reports & Reviews

Overpayment to Charity Scam Reports & Reviews (4)

- Boise, ID, USA

Phone: (740) 837-7876
Email: [email protected]
Country: United States
Type of a scam: Fake Check/Money Order

An Ethan Baker contacted me about making a $2000 contribution to our non-profit as per agreement with his wife Leslie. He had his financial assistant priority-mail a check from a financial institution in Texas with the name Bethany Sass as the payer, and he requested a deposit confirmation and tax receipt for his records. When I received the check, it was for $3780. I reached out to Ethan asking if it was a mistake and he said to go ahead with deposit and reiterated that I send him confirmation when I did so. I deposited the check and sent confirmation and receipt within 24hrs and he replied sounding confused about the amount difference, said his financial advisor screwed up, and his wife was very upset. He asked for me to refund the $1780 difference and had his financial advisor contact me, though it was via text. The hope was this would all be resolved amicably and quickly. I called my bank and asked them to look into the check and flag it, and did not reply to any of Ethan or his “advisor’s” following attempts to get ahold of me. The check for $3780 bounced within 4 days of deposit. Though largely, the most annoying of all of this was the amount of personal correspondence I had with the “donor” about our mission and values as an artistic non-profit, and the month-long email chain. What a waste of my time.

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Same thing happened with my charity. I had felt something was off in the correspondence with Ethan when he had asked for my phone number to text me. I ignored his email and forgot about it. Yesterday, we received a check from Big Daddy's Pawnshop with no other identifying information. Label on the envelope had the name Tyler Miller and an address in California. I thought that was odd and commented to my development director that I didn't know who this was because the only odd communication I had had from a donor was named Ethan Baker. This morning I had an email from Ethan letting me know the check that was from Big Daddy's Pawnshop was from him and I needed to confirm the deposit to him. I shared the email with my development director who googled Ethan's email address and found this site. Thank you for posting this.

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Thank you for this posting. Our charity has received the same "donation inquiry". If I had not seen your post, we would have wasted more time corresponding with this "donor".

Useful

Thanks for posting this. We got the same Ethan Baker guy with our national park-related association. Some red flags in his language choices -- and the fact the check was from "Bold City Distributors, LLC" instead of a family foundation or personal name -- made us google him and we found this posting. Very sorry this happened to you but at least by doing this write-up you saved another non-profit the same heartache!

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