CHICAGO (WLS) — It usually starts in a store parking lot.
You think you are giving people a $10 or $20 donation to raise money for funeral services for a child.
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But instead, you are handing over your credit or checking card and losing thousands of dollars.
Two women were pressured and then tricked into “tap-to-pay” donation schemes.
“I never, ever agreed to give $3,000,” said Estelle Fisher.
“And within that brief moment, they were able to get me on both sides of me, and then kind of wedged between where my car door opened,” said Kelly.
The con artists told these women that they were raising money for children’s funerals.
“So, I stopped. And then they talked to me about a kid who had been shot, and they were trying to get raise money for the funeral,” Estelle said.
Estelle Fisher and Kelly, who did not want to share her last name, both filed police reports after they say were recently victimized by this new scam.
“They’re like, ‘We’re just raising money for our little brother who died by gunfire.’ And they had a poster board with photos,” Kelly said.
Kelly does not want to use her last name out of fear of the criminals who scammed her. She says she was intimidated and then fooled into using her checking card, in her phone’s wallet, on a tap-to-pay device.
All of it happened in front of a drug store in Lincoln Park. She thought she was donating $25 dollars for the funeral. Instead, her checking card was charged $2,500.
“They insisted that it had to be tap-to-pay, and within a few seconds, they tapped my phone and took the $2,500,” Kelly said.
She says they ran off, and she looked at her bank app and saw the higher charge. Her bank, Wells Fargo, denied her fraud claims.
“They said that my phone was not stolen, so therefore I authorized the charge,” Kelly said.
Since the scammers used a PayPal business account to accept the money, she also reached out to them. She says PayPal also denied the claim.
“I don’t think it’s fair at all. I mean, if I were to walk into a store, and a store overcharged me that had these devices, I would be able to seek compensation for that,” Kelly said.
Wells Fargo declined comment, but after the I-Team reached out to PayPal, the company refunded Kelly.
“The moment you guys got involved, I feel like they called me shortly after,” Kelly said. “I don’t think it would have been done without that, and I mean, I was just honestly shocked at the call and very relieved that this is just kind of come to an end.”
“The reason the donation scam is a threat right now, because it’s increasing, not only here in Chicago and northern Illinois, but across the United States as well,” said Chicago-area Better Business Bureau President Steve Bernas.
Bernas says the scammers tend to target women and that banks may hesitate to refund consumers, since victims are tapping their cards.
“The squeaky wheel gets the oil, the louder the consumer gets, or the more they get involved with this. But really, it comes down to be between credit card fraud and credit card dispute. A lot of times, these credit card companies are saying, you willingly gave them your phone or your credit card information, that is not fraud,” Bernas said.
Estelle was a victim to a donation scam by a grocery store in the Ravenswood neighborhood. She says crooks showed her what looked like legitimate donation paperwork, so she agreed to donate $10.
“And I gave them my card to tap it. And while one of the guys was doing that, the other one was talking to me. And then the transaction was made, and we said goodbyes and I walked back to my work. And when I got there, I got an alert from my bank saying, whoa, fraud, fraud, alert, $3,000. And I was like, ‘What?'” Estelle said.
She says her bank, Bank of America, also denied her fraud claim to have charges reversed, but later approved it, after she filed it a as “billing dispute” instead.
The bank declined to comment on Estelle’s case but said it wants to warn clients to only give their credit cards to trusted merchants.
“It’s like, it’s $3,000. I’m a teacher. It’s like, a big amount of money for me. It’s like, it’s not small potatoes,” Estelle said.
The I-Team found that both women’s transactions came back to construction businesses with no apparent active business operations or offices.
“To, like, make someone feel so, like, helpless in that situation, like a vulnerable situation. And then the fact that they can get away with stealing this money, and it continues on and on. I just hope that, you know, there’s a stop to it,” Kelly said.
“Definitely don’t do what I did, which is like trust the people and don’t… and like not looking at the phone or the amount before tapping the card,” Estelle said.
Neither of the women was given receipts. Always ask for a receipt immediately after donating to anyone. And always research before donating.
A sign that it could be a rip-off is if the people who are asking for money don’t accept cash.
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