Two incidents to alert you about this afternoon. One – word of a credit-card scammer who hit West Seattle Nursery (WSB sponsor) – with a distinctive description, and a distinctive purchase – and WSN wants to make sure other businesses are on the lookout; two, word of a car break-in – read on for details of both:
Office manager Galen Guffy at West Seattle Nursery says a woman used a stolen card to make a $700 purchase a few days ago:
It was Friday afternoon (10/24/08) and the lady who used the stolen credit card was tall, long dark hair pulled back, wearing glasses, late 40’s, early 50’s. She purchased a very distinctive fountain – a tall vertical
rock sculpture (about 5′) in a green ceramic water bowl. She drove a mid-90’s model burgundy Toyota 4Runner. She was kind of a plain jane and came off to our staff as chatty, ordinary and natural-seeming. She made a point of telling us that she’d had an eye on this particular fountain and had been wanting to buy it for quite some time. We think she may be local. She certainly acted like she’d been here before.
Galen says they subsequently found out that the credit card’s real owner had lost her purse (with the card) earlier in the week, and that her credit-card statement shows the card was used at several other West Seattle businesses. Galen adds:
This is the latest in a series of thefts and shoplifting attempts happening recently at our business. We think that tough economic times combined with the rather trusting way that we sometimes handle regular transactions (letting people load their own soil amendments on busy days, etc.) might be tempting people to try to get away with things like this more and more.
Even before we could publish this, we got a P.S. from Galen, that a West Seattle Nursery staffer who helped the credit-card scammer on Friday “saw her again at Safeway in Jefferson Square,” and they have notified police of this sighting.
(ADDED 6:30 PM: Just got a phone call from the person whose credit cards were fraudulently used. She says that in all, two of her cards from the lost purse were used at West Seattle businesses including West 5, Safeway, Starbucks, 7-11, TrueValue, and Bartell, for a total of more than $2,000, in very short order. The cards had not immediately been reported as stolen/missing because as soon as she discovered it was missing, there were several places to backtrack to look for it – but in the meantime, they kept checking with the credit-card companies to make sure no one was using the cards, and as soon as they got word of activity, when the purse still hadn’t been found, they got the cards canceled. They’re still trying to figure out if anyone is liable for those charges made before they reported the cards missing.)
Meantime, one other Crime Watch note came in today, from Ray, who lives near 36th/Brandon (map):
Just wanted to pass this on to everyone. Our car was broken into last night sometime between 9:30 PM last night (Sun 10/27) and 6:00 AM this morning (Mon 10/28). Whoever it was smashed in the passenger window and took an iPod and some chargers, etc. The car was parked in the parking space in the alley behind our house.
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