When Keith Allen drove up to Bob Verdiel’s home, he knew something was awry.
Allen, who owns Great Canadian Carpet Cleaners, was contacted by phone to give a job estimate on the cleaning of a small area rug. Allen agreed to meet the caller at his house.
“He was really insistent about me calling him before I got to the house,” said Allen. “He said he didn’t like answering the door. That set some alarm bells off.”
The caller’s phone number didn’t start with a 604 or 250 prefix. “I’m used to getting numbers with area codes that are not ours because there’s a lot of people who have homes here who are from other places,” said Allen.
As he was pulling up, he recognized the house as Verdiel’s, someone he had already done work for. He phoned the number the caller had given him, but because his phone contract doesn’t allow international calls, it didn’t go through.
Allen went up to Verdiel’s door and knocked to try to find out what was going on.
“It’s a lottery scam is what it is,” said Bob Verdiel. “It started about a
month and a half ago.”
Verdiel explained to Allen that he had been targeted by a Jamaican lottery scam. In this kind of scam, people, often seniors, are requested to send money to release lottery winnings. After continual phone calls to his home, he changed his number. The scam artists then started having deliveries made to his address. Grocery stores, pizza places, taxis and even a tattoo studio were contacted to see if they’d make a delivery to Verdiel’s home.
Stacy Mogan of Aaron Service & Supply received a call from a man who said he was in the United States and was wondering if they would deliver a gift basket to his uncle in town. When she asked him how he was going to pay for it, he said his uncle would pay when the delivery was made.
“I thought that was really bizarre because why would he have to pay for his own gift?” said Mogan. “It didn’t make any sense. So then he wanted to talk to the delivery guy and had instructions for him. Everyone was at lunch so I asked for his number. I thought about it while at lunch and it just didn’t sit right, so I called the RCMP when I got back from lunch and explained what was going on.”
RCMP were familiar with the scam and asked Mogan not to attend to the house, explaining the homeowner was being targeted. “Of course we had no intentions of doing it anyways. I looked up his phone number on the Internet and it said that it was from Jamaica,” said Mogan.
“[The delivery people] are all packing a phone,” said Verdiel. “When they come they say someone wants to talk to me. It’s that guy. It’s a real pain.”
“This one has gone further than most,” said Constable Chris Bakker of the Powell River RCMP detachment. “We have a file open on this and it’s under investigation. We are seeing seniors getting phone calls requesting money once or twice a week.”
He advised that anyone who believes they are a victim of a scam should not feel ashamed. “The people who do this are very good at what they do. A lot of seniors don’t want to believe that they’ve been taken. We may not be able to recover the money, but there are other things that victim services can do to help.”
