By RANDY ERICKSON | Editor
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Like most people using e-mail, Judith Erickson had seen her share of Nigerian financial scams and knew not to even give them the time of day. But this scam was different. It claimed to offer a chance to make easy money working at home as an accounts receivable agent for Arcadia-based Ashley Furniture, the largest furniture maker and retailer in the country.


All Erickson had to do was first accept delivery by United Parcel Service of a cashier’s check or money order. Then she would deposit the Ashley Furniture customer’s payment in her account and then send a check of her own to the Ashley payment center, less 10 percent as payment for her services.

Erickson sent in her application information in mid-August and in a couple of weeks received her first UPS mailer. It contained a check for $6,830.

Of course, Erickson wasn’t about to cash it. She was collecting evidence to help authorities bring down the swindlers, whom she was convinced were bilking unsuspecting Americans and using the money to buy arms to use in terrorist attacks.

“I was really playing with it because I really thought they were trying to get money for arms,” said Erickson, an Onalaska resident known to jazz fans as singer Judi K. “They’re tempting as heck, and I can imagine older people especially getting involved.”

If she’d fallen for it as the scam artists planned, Erickson would have been out nearly $6,200, with little or no hope of catching the crooks. And some people have been taken worse.

Janet Jenkins, a former Onalaska resident who now heads the state Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection’s Trade and Consumer Protection Division, said she has had no reports of this Ashley Furniture variant of a well-established scam. But she wasn’t surprised that scam artists would use the Ashley Furniture name to try to lend an aura of legitimacy to the scam.

“The scam itself has been around for a long time, and we’ve certainly heard of it with other connections,” Jenkins said. “People lose a lot of money in scams like this.”

In fact, Jenkins knows of one case where a person got taken for $195,000. In that case, the checks were delivered much like they were to Erickson. But to get the person on the hook for big money, the scam artist actually sent checks that were good at first, with gradually larger checks leading up to a very big check that was no good.

A lot of these e-mail scams originate overseas, which makes it extremely hard for authorities to bring the scam artists to justice, Jenkins said.

“In order to have any hope of catching the criminals, you really need the help of federal authorities, the state authorities and a lot of times the international authorities,” Jenkins said. “Obviously, you need to trace the e-mails. That’s very difficult because by the time you trace them, they may be shut down and the criminals may be using different addresses.”

Even if nobody has fallen for the Ashley Furniture scam, which surfaced a couple months ago, it still has at least one victim — Ashley Furniture. Not only does the scam drag the company’s name down just by association, it also has created a lot of work for the company in trying to get the word out about the scam.

“We spend time on it everyday,” said Dwain Jansson, Ashley Furniture’s vice president of information technology. “We certainly are spending money to try to get it to stop, but we think other companies are dealing with it as well. … So far nobody’s gotten hurt yet. Of course, we’re very concerned about it because our good name is involved.”

The company has added a set of frequently asked questions pertaining to the scam on its Web site and has set up a special e-mail account — fraudreply@ashleyfurniture.com — where people can report cases or get more information.

“We want to make sure that people don’t think that we’re doing it,” Jansson said. “And we want them to know what they can do about it.”

The biggest thing people can do to avoid falling prey to a scam is be skeptical and pay attention to details. For example, Jansson said, look closely at the e-mail addresses from which suspicious offers originate. Any legitimate e-mail from Ashley Furniture would end in “@ashleyfurniture.com,” but the scam artists set up accounts with Yahoo, Google’s Gmail or America Online that look sort of legitimate at first glance but aren’t.

People also can get clues from the text of the scam come-on e-mails. Here’s part of one e-mail sent to Erickson after the scam artists shipped her first check:

“This will be your first assigment with the company and implore you to take this seriouse and also pls be sure to send me an e-mail as soon as you recieve the payment so that i could give you further instructions.”

No legitimate business would dare send out communications with the spelling and grammatical errors included in this message.

Common sense is undoubtedly the best weapon against being taken by a scam. Erickson realized right away that there was no legitimate reason why a company, especially one as well-established as Ashley Furniture, would need to recruit people to accept checks for the company and that it wouldn’t make a bit of sense to pay somebody 10 percent if they did.

Jenkins has a mantra that people should keep in mind at all times to avoid being taken advantage of: “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”

Contact Randy Erickson at randy.erickson@lee.net or 786-6812.

Identity theft scams a growing concern

One of biggest problems Janet Jenkins deals with as head of the state’s consumer protection division is identity theft.

It’s such a problem, in fact, that the Office of Privacy Protection was created under the consumer protection division to try to battle the growing problem.

“We actually have a specific Web site — privacy.wi.gov — that talks all about identity theft,” said Jenkins, who has headed the state Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection’s Trade and Consumer Protection Division since 2004.

People’s information can be harvested online, either through scams designed to get people to willingly submit information or by enterprising criminals mining different Web sites to put together all the facts about a person they’d need to submit a credit application, for example.

People also need to be wary when paying at a restaurant with a credit or debit card. Many restaurants have customers pay at the table, with the waiter or waitress taking the customer’s credit card out of sight for processing.

Jenkins said that’s an opportunity for unscrupulous restaurant employees — the vast minority, she emphasized — to use a device called a “skimmer” to electronically harvest the card’s information. Those card numbers could then be passed on to others for charging illegal purchases.

There have even been cases, Jenkins said, where a waiter would bring the credit-card processing machine to the table, then drop the card and while bending down to pick it up swipe it through a skimmer strapped to his leg.

Of course, Jenkins said, “the overwhelming majority of wait staff are perfectly wonderful law-abiding citizens who aren’t doing this.”

Just in case, though, people should be aware that they could be on the hook for all illegal charges to their debit card, Jenkins said, whereas there is limited liability with credit cards.

“Maybe the best thing to do is pay cash,” she said. “Nobody can screw around with the cash.”