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Don't be taken in by this shopping scam

If you are asked for personal information, just don't do it, say police

RCMP are warning people again to be aware of potential scams such as a fraudulent job posting a local woman stumbled on.

Corporal Richard van de Pol of the Oceanside RCMP said a woman applied for a “how to make money at home type job online.”

She then received a letter from the “Shoppers Arena in Quebec” with a $3,800 cheque and instructions to cash it, keep $300 and send the rest to a woman in the UK.

She tried to cash it at two financial institutions before she was told it wasn’t legitimate.

Van de Pol said the criminals hoped she’d deposit the cheque in her account and send cash before it bounced.

York Langerfeld, manager of TD Canada Trust in Qualicum Beach, says a cheque is not the same as cash — it’s a promise to pay.

“Cheque cashing is essentially a credit decision — if we credit your account right away with the full amount of the cheque or other instrument, we are granting you credit for that amount until we can verify that the promise to pay can be carried out,” Langerfeld stated in an e-mail to The News.

“If the promise to pay is broken, we will need to recover the funds from you, as we would for any other loan given to you.”

He added that when banks think there is a fraudulent situation at play, they try to inform their clients.

“We actually advised a customer yesterday that we thought the cheque she was trying to cash was probably fraudulent,” Langerfeld said. “She advised us that she was told we would probably say this and that she would take it to her other bank. 

“I certainly hope she’ll not be another victim.”

There was a similar incident reported in Campbell River the previous day and van de Pol said they still get frequent reports of people getting e-mails that look legitimate from places like Revenue Canada.

The e-mails say things like “you are determined to be receiving X amount of money back” and they should click on a link and provide personal information.

Van de Pol stressed legitimate organizations don’t operate like that, they are just criminals fishing for information that could be used fraudulently.

He said people need to be skeptical, think about where requests come from, do their own research and if they have any doubts, look up direct the organization and contact them directly yourself.

— with files from Steven Heywood