Since this scam is on the rebound I’m republishing the following:
A friend forwarded the following description of a scam aimed at a well-known college. Fortunately, they didn’t fall for it.
I would like to make everyone aware of a recent situation here that is most likely a scam to launder stolen credit card funds, appearing as a gift.
- A $9,000 gift is received and approved from an unknown entity (in this case a “Cassandra Harvey”), with Smyrna, GA address, Yahoo email and legitimate phone number.
- The next day, we receive an email from the donor with the following info: the $9,000 gift amount was a mistake, it should have been $900. The gift was made in memory of the donor’s late mother (never named) who had a wonderful experience at our college. Further, the original credit card from which the gift was made has been closed due to recent suspect activity and could we refund the $8,100 balance back to another credit card.
Comments
- We were able to refund the money back to the original credit card and immediately notified the credit card company and local police. Upon notifying the “donor” that we can only refund the money back to the original card, she replies that the original account is closed and that we need to use the other card.
- The scammer had done enough research to use specific references to our college to make it appear genuine, although there was considerable broken English in the emails.
- With the flurry of gift activity by our gift processing staff and within the context of providing good customer service to our donors, it could have been easy to overlook normal business rules and refund the balance to that other credit card
- Most likely the originating credit card is stolen, and by having us charge it and then remit most of the funds to another card, we would be “laundering” the funds for the scammer
As if we didn’t have enough to do right now!
Our non-profit in San Francisco also just got a suspicious gift of $8100. The donor info was listed with a GA phone number (same as listed above, which is how I found this thread) and a Indiana address.
This is the email and info of the fraudulent “donor”:
Christopher Mastriano
Hello ,i made a donation in memory of someone special and dear to my heart
and i just check my email now and i discover that i donated $8100,i have intention of donating $810 not $8100,am really
sorry for this silly mistake,
i will be glad if you can return $7290 to my corporate account with the following details CARD Number: 4285-****-0022-****
Expiry Date: 05/14 Cvv: ***.
I will be very glad to hear from you to ask for my full Visa Card Account information.
For security reason i have to clear some number of my Visa Account number, so when you confirm from your account about my
mistake i will forward you my full Visa Account.
i hope to hear from you soon.
Thanks
Christopher Mastriano
Got Christopher Mastriano’s email as well for $8100. Our credit card processor caught it for us and I found this website in time. We contacted our local police in metro Detroit.
Our non-profit in Metro Detroit also just got a suspicious gift of $8100. The donor info was listed with a GA phone number (same as listed above, which is how I found this thread) and a North Carolina Address. Our credit card processor flagged it as did I and contacted our local police department. Hopefully these people get caught.
Christie Larson’s fraudster, Davon White, just did it to us as well.
Hello ,i made a donation in memory of someone special and dear to my heart
and i just check my email now and i discover that i donated $8100,i have intention of donating $810 not $8100,am really
sorry for this silly mistake,
i will be glad if you can return $7290 to my corporate account with the following details CARD Number: 4285-****-0022-****
Expiry Date: 05/14 Cvv: ***.
I will be very glad to hear from you to ask for my full Visa Card Account information.
For security reason i have to clear some number of my Visa Account number, so when you confirm from your account about my
mistake i will forward you my full Visa Account.
i hope to hear from you soon.
Thanks
Davon White
So glad to have found this!! We had an $8,100 gift made by Davon White as well to our Rochester, NY nonprofit. The name was suspicious on its own – the gift even more so as it would be a large one for our nonprofit. We have not yet been contacted by the “fraudster”, but I was able to trace the credit card to the business whose address they used to make the gift – and it was in fact their corporate card number, obviously stolen.
Hope they catch these fraudsters!
We just received a gift for $8,300 from a “donor” in Ft. Collins, CO.
Luckily, they used a similar phone number and when I googled it I found this string!! Thank you everyone who has posted in the past!!
Kate
He hit our organization, too, apparently using a stolen identity and credit card.
Hello ,i made a donation in memory of someone special and dear to my heart
and i just check my email now and i discover that i donated $8300,i have intention of donating $830 not $8300,am really
sorry for this silly mistake,
i will be glad if you can return $7470 to my corporate account with the following details CARD Number: 4285-****-0022-****
Expiry Date: 05/14 Cvv: ***.
I will be very glad to hear from you to ask for my full Visa Card Account information.
For security reason i have to clear some number of my Visa Account number, so when you confirm from your account about my
mistake i will forward you my full Visa Account.
i hope to hear from you soon.
Thanks
[name removed by moderator]
Hope they catch this loser!
We also just received a “gift” from Christopher Mastriano. The gift was for $8,300 and we haven’t gotten the second call yet, but I am voiding the transaction. I have had one of these before and it’s a scam. Thanks to our gift acceptance portal for helping us. We love Acceptiva.
Just got hit today at a small nonprofit in Boston:
Hello ,i made a donation in memory of someone special and dear to my heart
and i just check my email now and i discover that i donated $8300,i have intention of donating $830 not $8300,am really
sorry for this silly mistake,
i will be glad if you can return $7470 to my corporate account with the following details CARD Number: 4285-****-0022-****
Expiry Date: 05/14 Cvv: ***.
I will be very glad to hear from you to ask for my full Visa Card Account information.
For security reason i have to clear some number of my Visa Account number, so when you confirm from your account about my
mistake i will forward you my full Visa Account.
i hope to hear from you soon.
Thanks
[name removed by moderator]
We just received a donation for $1100 from Davon White using an address at the University of Arizona and the same phone number as noted in above thread. I’ll post later if we receive the follow up from the scammer. Thanks so much for this helpful website.
And here’s the follow up, just as described. We have a credit card processor, but I am not totally sure who to turn this over to. Thanks for any advice.
Greetings
Thanks for mail confirmation sent to me for my Donation made.
Am Sorry to tell you this, When i receive donation confirmation in my
e-mail i see that i have made mistake in donation amount by double
typing and my intended donation amount was just $110.00 and not
$1100.00.
Hope you fully understand me of this error and i will like your full
corporation in solving this matter for me today.
Kindly refund back my visa Account that was debited for the donation,
credit back $990.00 out of $1100 back to my Corporate Visa stated :
Account Number: 4120********** Exp: 0*/20**.
Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any question, and
also forward to me a copy of the refund transaction receipt.
Sorry for the inconvenience that this might have been caused your Organization.
Kind Regards
Davon White
I just read further up the thread, and will contact my credit card processor and let them take over the investigation.
Our nonprofit also received a donation for $1,100 from Davon White. Two days later we received an email asking us to refund almost of of this gift to another credit card, which he supplied in the email. We had researched the donor and knew it was a scam so we refunded the full amount to the original credit card and filed fraud complaints with Paypal and with http://www.ic3.gov. Paypal alerted us to this government fraud site and per their website “The IC3 accepts online Internet crime complaints from either the actual victim or from a third party to the complainant.”
We had an attempt this week in Kalamazoo…
“Dear Sir/Ma,
Is a pleasure to be one of this donor to your foundation, your organization was introduced through donor mailing list sent to my mail box.
Confirmation receipt of donation i made was received but to my surprised i planned to make a donor of $200.00 but mistakenly or typographical error was occurred during this transaction, i made transaction of $2200.00 instead.
I was deadly amazed when i saw this and i intended to donate $200.00 not $2200.00
Hopefully you understand what this meant.
In view of this, I will like you to refund back $2000.00 from $2200.00 donation made in error to my visa Account number stated below:
A/C Number: 4120********8300
Exp Date: 06/20**
Please do contact me if you have any question and copy me refund receipt when you correct the amount.
I am very sorry for this inconvenience.
Kind Regards
Dr. Janet Christopher”
I hope this scam artist is eventually “deadly amazed” at being caught.
-Maria