Scam alert: Area woman warns of con artist that almost nabbed her

Renee Gruen never thought she’d be a victim of a telephone scam — the kind where a caller informs you that you’ve won a huge amount of money and only need to send a check for a “processing fee” to collect your prize. Yet, last week she came horrifiyingly close to doing just that.

“You think you’d never fall for something like that, but I almost did,” Gruen admitted.

It all began Tuesday around 4:30 p.m. after Gruen got home from a long day of work at Lakeview Health Center. She’d started her day at 5 a.m. and was exhausted.

“I was really tired and then I got a phone call. At first I wasn’t going to answer it because it said ‘unknown caller,’ but then I was curious about who it could be,” recalled Gruen. The pleasant voice on the other end sounded familiar, and at first she thought it was a friend. By the time she realized it wasn’t, a kind of rapport with the caller had already been established.

“He proceeded to tell me that I’d won $2.5 million from Walmart and Macy’s,”Gruen said. “I asked him how I could’ve won since I never entered any contest. He told me that my name had been drawn from receipts. Then I asked why Walmart hadn’t called me themselves. He said that it was supposed to be a surprise.”

The man then asked whether she wanted the money to be presented to her with TV cameras or in private. Gruen decided she didn’t want TV cameras around and asked if she could tell her husband. “Yes, but no one else,” was the response.

“Then he told me there would be a processing fee of $260 and that he was calling from Price Waterhouse in Las Vegas. “We’ve been approved by the Better Business Bureau,” he assured her.

“He also said that I would need the receipt from the processing fee to receive the money when they came to the door the next morning,” Gruen said.

By now, Gruen’s head was spinning and she didn’t quite know what to think. “How can this be?” she asked.

At this point, the scammer played his ace in the hole. “Do you believe in God?” he asked. Gruen, who has a strong faith, said that she did. The two talked further and the caller told her that he was a pastor’s son, while Gruen mentioned that her husband Ron was handicapped and in a wheelchair.

“Well,” said the scammer, “this is a gift from God to you.”

“I didn’t realize it at the time but he was subtly brainwashing me,” Gruen said. “He hadn’t asked for any account numbers, which I was looking for and he sympathized with me, about the situation with my husband and how hardworking I was. I started to overlook the $260 and think about the prize money.”

The scammer asked if Gruen’s bank was closing soon — it was almost 5 p.m. by then — and when he learned it was he said he’d call her back in the morning and that he was flying up from Las Vegas in a private jet to present her with the money Wednesday morning.

After she hung up, Gruen mentioned the call to Ron. “I told him it must be legitimate because he didn’t ask for any account numbers and he did say the company was approved by the Better Business Bureau,” she said.

But for some reason she didn’t tell her husband about the processing fee.

That night, according to Ron, they began to think about what might happen if the prize were real. “You think ‘this is what we could do with the money and this is who we could help.’” he recalled. Still, Ron remained skeptical.

“Oh Ron, have a little faith!” Gruen recalled telling him. “My head was in a cloud — I felt like I’d finally won something. I guess the lesson is to beware of your emotions.”

The next morning the caller was back, but this time Ron was on the other line. When Ron heard about the processing fee, he objected, saying that it must be a scam. Renee, still under the influence of her emotions, told him to hush up.

She was told to go to Walmart and get a MoneyGram and send it to “our accountant” in Douglasville, Ga. Meanwhile, the original scammer had passed the phone on to his supposed manager, a “Mr. Bradford.”

“He got upset that Ron was with me on the line,” Gruen said. “He asked whether I had a cellphone he could call me on and I gave him the number. I was losing focus — I never thought I would but I did.”

Fortunately, Ron did convince his wife to call the West Salem police about the matter after she hung up. “The police officer (Brett Myer) came over right away. After I told him about the delivery and processing fee, he told me, ‘This is fraud.’” Gruen said.

By this time it was only a half hour before the delivery of the supposed $2.5 million prize and Gruen was starting to come to her senses. She received two more cellphone calls that she did not pick up, but she did answer when one of the scammers called her home phone. When asked if she’d gotten the MoneyGram, she told him she had, even though she hadn’t.

Eventually, when she was unable to provide the numbers he realized she hadn’t really sent off the money. At that point he got belligerent. “Why would I want your money? Why didn’t you tell me you wanted to cancel the deal?” he demanded.

Asked again if she wanted to cancel the “deal,” Gruen shouted “Yes!”

She had one more emotional hurdle, however. “Just then the mail lady came to the door and she was carrying a package,” Gruen recalled. “For one moment I thought maybe it really was the prize delivery and I yelled, “It’s here!”

As it turned out, the delivery was a package frm Degen Berglund for Ron. “My family still laughs about that,” Gruen said.

She’s still somewhat amazed how close she came to be taken in. “It’s very easy to be deceived, no matter how intelligent you are. They find your weakness — for me it was my faith. He struck a chord with my faith.”

For his part, Ron said that he started to become suspicious when he realized the caller seemed to be reading from a script.

“And when you think about it,” he said, “it doesn’t make much sense that they’re giving you $2.5 million, but they can’t afford $260 for processing,” he said.

Gruen thinks that people are likely to be more vulnerable to this kind of scam because of the current economic hard times.

“If it wouldn’t have been for Ron, I would have gone down there and sent them that money. It’s somewhat embarrassing (to have her story in the paper), yes, but I want people to know what can happen when you’re tired and vulnerable.”

Ron agreed: “It’s a little embarrassing for us, but I’d rather that than someone else gets hurt.”

Asked to comment on the scam, West Salem Police Chief Charles Ashbeck said it was a typical telephone scam case. “We get a lot of them involving asking the prize winner to purchase and send a MoneyGram from Walmart,” Ashbeck said. “To our knowledge, none of them have ever been legitimate. My advice is if it sounds too good to be true, it is.”