Buffalo Township police honor postal clerk for preventing three scams
BUFFALO TWP — Melissa Placek, manager at South Pike Postal & Notary on Mulone Drive, was honored by the township’s police department Wednesday, Aug. 12, for preventing three older residents from becoming victims of fraud and losing substantial sums of money.
“Over the past several months alone, this business and this young lady has saved nearly $100,000,” said Buffalo Township Police Chief Tim Derringer. “In my 27 years in law enforcement, I have yet to see a victim get their money back until this young lady’s done it.”
According to Placek, the three separate incidents all took place over a span of three months, with the most recent occurring Friday, Aug. 7. All involved residents who were pressured by scammers into making suspicious overnight shipments at South Pike Postal under false pretenses.
Though the mechanisms of each of the scams was slightly different, all had something in common — the shipments all contained large sums of cash.
“To be honest, when the second one happened, I was like, ‘This can’t be true,’” Placek said.
In the first incident, a woman came to South Pike Postal saying she wanted to ship a Dollar General coffee pot through FedEx’s “first overnight” service, an expensive shipment option which promises delivery to most areas by early morning. This struck Placek as odd.
“She's like, ‘I need to ship this out overnight to my nephew in Florida. Their coffee pot broke,’” Placek said. “That’s a red flag to me. Why are we shipping a $20 coffee pot for $500 overnight to Florida?”
Because South Pike Postal is a licensed FedEx shipping center, employees have the right to open and inspect overnight packages if they suspect any irregularities, which Placek did. Her suspicions were confirmed when she spotted a wad of dollar bills inside the coffee pot which totaled $15,000, as well as a debit card. As it turned out, the woman had been sent a text which was supposedly from her bank, urging her to pull her money out of her account due to a security breach.
“They told her that her bank was hacked and she had to pull her money out of the bank in Pennsylvania and get it shipped down to Florida to open a new account,” Placek said.
In the second incident, another woman was prevented from sending $30,000 in a box after being convinced she was in the process of winning $15 million in a lottery and just needed to send that amount to claim her winnings. Although the woman received the $30,000 back, she had already sent away $60,000 in a previous shipment, according to Placek.
“That wasn’t through us,” Placek said. “She told the officers that she sent money prior. I’m not sure who she sent the money through, but it wasn’t us.”
Finally, on Friday, Placek was able to prevent a man from sending away $27,000 in cash which was wrapped in aluminum foil. He told her he was shipping books overnight to a friend in California. It later turned out he had received communication from someone pretending to be Microsoft, demanding money to “unhack” their computer.
“These are all older victims, and scammers are very, very tricky at this point,” Derringer said during Wednesday night’s meeting. “They get into your phone. They get into your computer. And you get mind-warped into doing these things.”
Placek advises anyone who has the slightest amount of suspicion about a transaction to call either a loved one or the police to ask for advice.
“If someone gets a hold of you and says, ‘You need to ship this money out,’ call someone you trust... a daughter or son, a niece or nephew. Call the police, call someone that you can trust and be like, ‘Is this true?’” Placek said.
