Don't cash that check!

A local resident received an apparently real check for a whopping $4,850 fromthe University of Texas, Houston, Thursday.
The check had been sent via UPS to Jan Pearman’s mailbox. Suspecting something was not quite right, Pearman checked with her local bank, discovering the check was part of a scam.
“You’re number nine today,” said Christa Lynch, treasury manager at the University of Texas Health Science Center, on whose account the check was drawn.
Lynch said the checks were fraudulent, although the routing number they contained was real.
“The ones we’ve received you can tell are homemade,” she said of checks turned over to the college from throughout the country.
“You can get blank checks at Office Depot, or print them off your home computer,” she said, suspecting that’s how these are being generated. She had never heard of the person who mailed the check, a Chris Frazier from Freehold, N.J., but the name on the check — albeit an electronic signature — was real.
“She’s an employee who worked here four years ago,” Lynch said of the ‘signer.’
But these checks don’t meet current standards for the college’s account, Lynch said. Plus, “We don’t even write checks on that account.”
“I just think it’s a common scam,” Lynch said.
Individuals she has talked to so far have one thing in common: They all signed up for something on line. One victim sold a washing machine through E-Bay, she said. They received the check — also written for $4,850 — and were asked to return the excessive portion, keeping “$100 for their trouble,” Lynch said. When the bank required repayment, however, the person had to take out a loan to pay it back.
Another girl, she said, applied for a loan on line and assumed the check was for that purpose — even though she had not applied through the University of Texas, nor was she a student there. “She was in tears when I told her it wasn’t real,” Lynch said.
Pearman was more savvy. She knows money isn’t free, and didn’t cash the check. But she did sign up for something on line recently, she said.
Earlier in the month, she responded to an e-mail to become a mystery shopper. “My guard was down,” she said. “It’s not something I normally do.”
Lynch suspects someone is buying names off the Internet, then sending out the fraudulent checks in the hopes of receiving cash back, as in the E-Bay case. Police in Texas are looking into the matter, Lynch said.
Neither Lynch nor Pearman know if anyone else in or around Iola has received the checks, but Pearman said, “I just don’t want someone else to get taken.”