Scammed!!! Help?

[Linda Weygant]

I had a tenant who asked me to set up an online payment service for her or her father to make rent payments to.  Her father is from California.

I set it up through my QuickBooks software using the Intuit Payment Network.  Her father sent several payments from the service totalling $4000.00 over the past two months through his business called Top Leading.

Today, I received an email notification from my bank that I was about to NSF.  I logged in and saw that the $4000 worth of payments were all reversing.  When I logged into the Intuit Payment Network the payments showed as canceled due to incorrectly entered bank information.

I rushed down to my bank with a deposit to make sure I don't bounce checks, so that's all good.

I called Top Leading in California and they have never heard of my tenant, her father or me.  They said they've also been the victim of fraud recently and have an ongoing investigation with the police

Surprise, surprise, I can't get in touch with my tenant now either.

What's the next step?

[Linda Weygant]

I put on my super sleuth shoes and here is what I found.

The woman who owns the company above called me back and we had a nice long conversation.  During the first conversation, neither of us was willing to share too much info, but she was curious and started talking first so here's what we discovered.

Her company is a property management company in California.

About a week ago, one of her landlord clients came in with his bank statements and asked what all of the payments were out of his account.  She told him she didn't know and that if he didn't know either, they should report fraud to his bank.  So they did.  Apparently this guy hadn't looked at his bank statements for four month, but his bank honored their fraud policy and reversed all four payments, which is why it trickled down to me today.

After some digging and some further calls back and forth, we discovered that my tenant is a tenant this guy had three years ago.  She had his banking information so she could deposit directly into his account.

I went to the police station and here's what they told me.

The actual victim of the crime is the former landlord, not me.  So he needs to file a police report.

But he also said the reality of the situation is that it's anybody's guess who actually has jurisdiction on this.  Allegedly she was in Colorado when she entered the bank account info, but who can prove that?  There is no proof on WHERE the crime was committed, so both Colorado and California will let the case sit.

When you boil it down, the guy in California has been made whole since his bank reversed the charges and all I have is a case of unpaid rent.  So it's back to eviction court for me!

I just printed off the 3 day letter and I'm off to not just leave it on her door, but confront her about the whole topic.  The police told me that I can lie as much as I want and tell her there's a warrant out for her arrest so she'd better just leave instead of making me pay the $300 it's going to take to evict her.  I just can't physically threaten her.  He's also got a standby alert on in case it goes south.  He said he's going to have a cop car in the condo complex for the next 3 hours in case I need backup and that I should call him when I leave so he can have the car leave afterwards.

Wish me luck!