Lory’s Place in St. Joseph is telling the community about a scam that it avoided, partly thanks to the diligence of city staff and the mayor.
Lory’s Place Director Stephanie Kohler-Pagan tells us the organization last week received an invoice, supposedly from the city of St. Joseph, for its Run, Walk, and Rock event application. She says the letter purported to be from the city zoning administrator, seeking $2,800 just for the application. Kohler-Pagan sought clarification from the sender.
“By the time she had reached out to me the second time, I really started to question, and so I was sharing this again with our treasurer and agreed that we needed to reach directly to somebody at the city because it made it clear, the other red flags in the email were they wanted a wire transfer,” Kohler-Pagan said. “That was a red flag. Also, a red flag was that you could not contact them, that they wanted email communication so that it could be documented.”
After communicating back and forth with the sender, Lory’s Place contacted the city.
“We reached back out to the city, actually reached directly to the mayor, and she was very taken aback by it. She said, ‘I’ve never heard of this, let me get in touch with somebody else here,’ and very quickly got back to us and stated it was a scam.”
Kohler-Pagan says the letter from the city looked real enough and contained information that could have fooled its target if they weren’t being careful.
City of St. Joseph Communications Director Kayla Griffith tells us scams like this have become common around the country, and the city is taking steps to fight back. It’s also telling everyone to give a second thought to unexpected correspondence seeking payments.
“I think it’s really important that if you get an invoice from the city, first of all, you should always be looking to make sure that it looks like consistent with other city communications,” Griffith said. “If there’s a named person, it’s always good practice to go and check the city website, the directory, to make sure that that person is a staff member of the city and to generally check who is sending these invoices. If something doesn’t feel right, if the charges feel outrageous, if maybe you’re getting a bill from the planning commission and you’re submitting for a special event, anything that seems a little funny, we really encourage people to reach out to the city before paying anything via wire transfer.”
There are some other clues.
“On some of these invoices, it also says to reply back to this email and doesn’t necessarily list the city’s contact information. That’s a really great sign to double-check who the sender is. Go through really carefully, look at each word. Sometimes these spammers can get kind of tricky with like .corn to make it look like .com, but it’s not quite. So it might look like a legitimate email address, but when you really look closely, things are a little bit off.”
Griffith says the latest scams have involved people who have put in applications to the city that have to be approved by the city commission. It’s possible that because such documents are public, it’s easier for the scammers to get contact and other information to make them appear legitimate.
The city is changing some of the application formats to leave out certain details to try to prevent the scams. It’s also adding banners to some pages of its website to warn everyone.
For Lory’s Place, Kohler-Pagan says the city has always been highly supportive of its Run, Walk, and Rock event, something that gave her extra pause when she received the scam letter.
“The city has never charged us, and they fully support this event year after year after year in every way imaginable,” Kohler-Pagan said. “They’ve been amazing. And so I was really surprised to get the invoice. And so I’m glad that we dug into it and really investigated it.”
Kohler-Pagan says she’s glad this scam is now getting attention. She tells everyone to be careful with any correspondence they receive seeking payment because the scammers are getting better at looking legitimate.
