Police beat: Fraud over Facebook, and a grieving easy mark

Editor’s note: Compiled from reports to Tacoma police.

Feb. 29: Pop quiz: Suppose a stranger sends you a Facebook message and asks for your bank account information. What do you do?

a. Close the message and block the sender.

b. Hand over the information and let the stranger make deposits.

The 23-year-old woman chose option b. The results were predictable.

Shortly after midnight, she knocked at the door of the police substation at 1524 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, and filed a fraud report.

The woman had received a Facebook message a few days earlier, she said. The stranger used a profile picture of a woman who looked somewhere between 20 and 30. The stranger asked the woman if she wanted to make some money — from $3,000 to $20,000.

The woman said yes.

Which bank did she use, the stranger asked.

The woman named the bank.

The stranger mentioned a cousin, a bank consultant who knew important rules about international banks, unauthorized charges and hidden fees that most people didn’t know. Out of the goodness of his heart, the cousin had taken it upon himself to inform people.

The stranger asked for the woman’s phone number. The woman gave it. Soon, she gave her bank account username name and password, and answers to security questions, such as her high school mascot and the name of her first employer.

The stranger said the woman could withdraw all the money from her bank account; that way it would be obvious that no one was stealing from her. Communication shifted from Facebook to phones, with 15 separate calls in one day, the woman said.

The woman started receiving email alerts from her bank. She had almost $5,000 in her account that hadn’t been there a day earlier.

The stranger called after that, and said the deposit was a mistake. The woman needed to withdraw the money in chunks, and send it to four people in Illinois.

The woman followed instructions and wired the money. Within a day, another deposit, again close to $5,000, appeared in her account.

Finally suspicious, the woman tried to log into her account. It was blocked. Another email alert said her balance was overdrawn by almost $5,000. She called her bank; her bank told her to call police.

The stranger’s Facebook profile, source of the original messages, was gone. The phone number the stranger had used no longer worked. The woman shared the information with an officer, who filed a report for information purposes.

Feb. 29: Grieving and alone, the 50-year-old man drank in a hotel room. It had been 10 years to the day since his wife and son died.

That was the story he told the officers, who responded to a reported robbery at the hotel in the 7000 block of Pacific Avenue.

The man said he heard a knock at the door earlier. A stranger, a 37-year-old woman, stood in the entryway. She wondered if the man wanted company.

The man let her in. They shared another bottle, and drugs the man didn’t identify. As the evening wore on, the woman called a friend, a younger man who came over and joined the party until the liquor ran out.

The older man said he was too drunk to drive. He gave the younger man the keys to his car for a food run. The man brought food back.

Before long, the woman and the younger man tried to persuade the man to give up any cash he had. The man said he didn’t have any. The couple said they would take his car. The man said that was unacceptable.

A struggle followed, the man said. The couple wrestled him to the ground and tried to take his keys. The man took a shot to the head during the scrum. The couple found the keys and fled.

Officers searched the area and found nothing at first. Eventually, they spotted a woman who matched the description the man had given. The man identified her.

At first the woman avoided contact. Officers caught up with her. She gave a false name. Officers found the real name.

They read the woman her rights. She said she didn’t understand and didn’t want to understand. Without prompting, she told a story.

She said she’d been counseling the man for the last two days after meeting him at the hotel. She said the man was drinking heavily. At times he seemed to want more than sympathetic company, the woman said, but she wasn’t willing.

The woman said the man let her use his car several times to go to the store to get liquor and food.

She denied taking money from him. She denied that anyone else had been in the room with them. She said she was a “mandatory reporter,” and was only hanging out with the man because she felt bad for him.

Did she have the man’s car keys?

Yes, the woman said — but only so he didn’t go out and kill someone by driving drunk. Officers took the keys and called a commander, who assessed the situation and agreed to book the woman based on the man’s statements.

A records check revealed the woman had active arrest warrants, one for prostitution. Officers booked her into the Pierce County Jail on the warrants and suspicion of first-degree robbery. They found no sign of the unidentified man.

This story was originally published March 5, 2016 at 8:00 AM with the headline "Police beat: Fraud over Facebook, and a grieving easy mark."