A reader hopes telling her story will keep others from falling for the same scam. She says this happened to her in the lot at Metropolitan Market in Admiral this past Saturday:
There is a guy riding around in a brand-new white Ford pickup truck approaching women at supermarket parking lots. He says he’s a mobile dent and ding repair business but I have tracked another victim and the m.o. is the same. He “repairs” your car and then covers the “repair” with something that you cannot remove for 24 to 48 hours so you pay him before you realize you are scammed. He’s super-convincing and I don’t want anyone else falling for it.
He actually made the dent worse by sinking something like tap screws in and then pulling it but he pulled the paint and primer off! Yes, I could not see that until I got home and realized what the scam was. He represented that he was a mobile business. I should have known better but there is (another victim) who was also scammed at the Whole Foods in Bellevue. Her repair had tape on it.
We asked her for a description of the man: “He’s probably close to 6 feet tall, brown hair, brown eyes, ponytail. Olive complexion. Late 50s, early 60s.” In researching the scam, she found this story about similar cases from 2013 and believes – because of cross-referencing two kinds of information she got from the man – this could involve one of those people. She has filed a report with SPD so if you have any information – or have also been victimized – you can refer to incident # 23-037964.
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