The case of the vanishing deposit: Woman defrauded in catfishing check scam that reveals vulnerability of bank accounts
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, Illinois, 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
