A con artist was brazen enough to get on a phone call with the promotional products distributor he was trying to scheme out of more than $60,000 worth of reusable water bottles.
It’s one of the new-wrinkle details in a recent rip-off attempt that’s part of an ongoing run of similarly styled scams aimed at promo industry firms.
In this case, Zach Belyew, owner of St. Louis, MO-area distributor Mason Marketing Group, was savvy enough to recognize the approach as a would-be swindle. But even with his more than 20 years of industry experience, Belyew admits the crookery took a bit of doing to spot. “It was pretty elaborate,” he tells ASI Media.
The impostor followed a familiar pattern, contacting Mason Marketing Group through a web form and then primarily continuing the interaction through email.
The crook was posing as Michael Tedesco, a real information technology employee at Ohio University. Crooks have used Tedesco’s name before but appear to even more frequently front in digital communications with promo distributors such as Michael Pidcock – a compliance manager at the same school. Pidcock, Tedesco and Ohio University have nothing to do with the scams; they’re identity theft victims, essentially.
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The crook was asking Belyew for $63,120 worth of branded 22-ounce Thor Copper Vacuum Insulated Bottles with a one-color, one-location print. To give the purported order a greater veneer of validity, the fake Tedesco even referenced another real Ohio University employee, Christy King, saying she was an accounts payable pro.
The criminal submitted a purchase order (PO# 1176995) and wanted Net 30 terms – a red flag on a first order from a supposed new client and not the only one.
“The first red flag was he had me shipping to a freight-forwarder and not a warehouse like he claimed,” explains Belyew. “The second was that the email addresses he was referencing were different than what’s on the university’s website for employees – ‘@ohio-education.org’ and not ‘@ohio.edu.’”
Another caution raiser: just how fast the bogus buyer moved to final approval. “The size of the order had me on edge, and he cut the PO very quickly,” Belyew says.
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Still, Belyew shares, the criminal did speak with him on the phone. While that’s not unheard of, it’s more common for the swindlers to stick to digital communications.
Suspecting the worse but still wanting to confirm, Belyew contacted Ohio University. “I got a hold of a university employee who confirmed this was a scam,” Belyew shares.
Had Belyew fulfilled the order, the crook would have made off with water bottles and never paid Mason Marketing Group a cent.
The scheme follows a formula that scammers have been working for years. They contact distributors through email/website order submission forms and pose as actual buyers for universities, businesses, nonprofits, household-name brands and other organizations. The aim is to trick the merch pros into providing what often amounts to five or six figures’ worth of products for which the crooks will never pay.
