Christine Settingsgaard sits in her yard on Sept 14, 2022, in Barrington. Settingsgaard was lured into sophisticated financial scam this summer via a man she met on Hinge. (Stacey Wescott / Chicago Tribune)
Only when it was too late did Christine Settingsgaard see the red flags festooning her online boyfriend.
He communicated by text messages and phone calls, never by video. He always had an excuse for why he couldn’t meet in person. And when he was supposedly called away to a remote job site, he said he couldn’t access his bank, which led to an urgent request.
He asked Settingsgaard, 37, a single mother of three who lives in Barrington, to deposit an $85,000 check into her bank account and then wire $82,000 to his sister in Utah. When she was done, he said, he would give her a big surprise.
“Trust me, you’ll love it!!!” he wrote.
Settingsgaard got a surprise, all right. The man she thought was Mark, an architectural engineer from Greece, was a catfisher. His entire persona was fake, and so was the check he used to trap her in an old but durable scam.
The swindle takes advantage of a vulnerability in America’s banking system, which sometimes makes funds from deposited checks available before they’re confirmed as genuine. Banks essentially advance the money to their customers, but when checks turn out to be fraudulent, customers must repay what they’ve spent.
Thousands of Americans are fleeced for millions of dollars each year through various permutations of the scam. Steve Baker, a former official in the Federal Trade Commission and investigator for the Better Business Bureau, has found that job seekers, business owners and even attorneys have been stung.
Read more here.
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