While this didn't happen directly to me, it happened to my daughter. She applied for the job of admin. assistant and was fortunate enough to be picked by this character. She hadn't even formally "accepted" the position when she received a priority package in the mail. Since this is not a common occurence to receive in the mail (especially if you are only 20), I was curious about the package.
I was more curious when the return address was for a woman named Gwen Heckeroth in California. A little google search and I found out she owns The Flying Skirt of San Francisco which is some kind of belly dancer costume place. My daughter wasn't home so my husband and I decided we should open this package because it just didn't seem right. There was a check for $2, 950 in there. No note. Just a check. Alarm bells really started going off so I got a hold of my daughter and asked her who this was and why would they be sending her a check.
When she got home she checked her email and she had an email from Willy Cheves instructing her to deposit this check into her account and then wire money to an orphanage in South Africa which to my knowledge does not exist. I have been trying to pinpoint what exactly is at the address we were given, if anything at all. She was then to wire money to an orphanage in California. When I tracked that address down in was for an adult daycare center. She was to email him back with all the tracking numbers and information. Instead she replied to him asking him to call her which he didn't.
I called the bank that issued the cashiers check and they had no record of this check at all, which didn't surprise me. I had made a copy of the check and when the security measures didn't kick in on the copy of check I knew something was really wrong. The bank told me to bring the check in so they could look into it further but I decided that involving the police was the way to go.
Again, I am a naturally curious person so I started looking into this guy. He is not licensed anywhere in Canada as an attorney. I looked up every province's law society and he is nowhere to be found. I also checked Ohio's bar since we live in Ohio and shockingly he wasn't listed there either. I then did a reverse phone search on the phone number he listed on his website which traces back to a phone in Cook County Illinois (Chicago area).
So I checked their bar association to. And of course he isn't there either. So he is all over the map here. I then decided to look into the woman who supposedly sent the package. Now I don't want to talk to badly about her because I cannot prove whether she was intentionally involved or not but her website for her business is basically the same as Willy Cheves... no phone number only contact is through email which we did and have yet to receive a response from her.
I am so relieved that we opened this package for my daughter and that we were fortunate enough to suspect that something wasn't right. We filed a police report who said they would forward this to the secret service since this is there area. I plan on following up with them in the next week or so.
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