CLINTON, Iowa — A rural Dewitt man says he fell victim to a work-from-home scam for a couple of weeks this fall, mailing out checks to people who agreed to wrap their cars in advertising.
"In retrospect, there were things that should've thrown up some red flags," Don Zuehl says.
Zuehl says after surgery he was out of work for more than a year, so he found a remote job online, through SurePayroll Company, as a payroll specialist.
"I needed to help supplement our income in some way," he says. "My wife works what amounts to basically two full-time jobs."
All he needed to do was print out checks and ship them out through USPS or Fed-Ex. He was promised $3,000 a month for his work, but he never got paid. He was sent a check for a much higher amount, and that's when he got suspicious. He didn't cash that check, and an inspector at the post office looked into the pre-paid mailing labels which turned out to be fraudulent.
"They called him a payroll specialist. We call it a counterfeiter," Scott County Sheriff's Office Seniors vs. Crime Director Randy Meier says.
Meier says a scam like this has two parts.
"We have the retail level, where people are signing up to get their cars wrapped and get paid for that, then in turn are supposed to pay the wrappers," he says. "Then you have the higher level, the wholesale level, where Don comes in. He creates the checks but he's only in the middle because there's people above him."
Meier says Don printed out nearly 400 checks, totaling out to about $903,000. He says a situation like this is scam because those checks are fake and will bounce, and once money is withdrawn and a portion makes its way back to the company, the victim is left to pay the bank the whole amount.
"I'm positive of it -- there is a percentage of people who fell for this," Meier says. "(Of the) $903,000 in checks that were written, (I believe) at least 10 percent of people fell for it. We could be looking at a loss of $90,000."
Zuehl says he was devastated to find out he was involved in a scam like this. He says he wishes he did more research, and he hopes other people out there aren't taken advantage of like he was.
"We need to figure out how to get these guys somehow," he says. "This crap needs to be stopped. I know there's a lot of people out there like me that really do need the help financially."
In the end, Zeuhl was only out a few hundred dollars, after buying a printer and spending on gas for trips to the post office and Fed-Ex in Davenport. The Clinton County Sheriff's Office is investigating this incident, and says they haven't traced any fake checks in the Quad City area.