A conman is scamming Vietnamese
seniors in Westminster.
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“Several elderly Vietnamese
residents have reported to WPD
that they had been conned out of several thousand dollars by a subject
who had
seemed so sincere,” reports Van Woodson, the Westminster Police Department's public information officer.
He approaches elderly Vietnamese people coming out
of church, engages them in conversation and then asks for their assistance.
“The suspect
claims to be an African immigrant
who has just inherited a fortune from a rich Beverly Hills relative,” Woodson says. “The
suspect claims to share his victim's
religious faith and says that he wants to donate several thousand
dollars to
their church.”
However, due to his non-resident status, the man tells his marks, he is unable to legally
make any
donations.
“The victims agree to make the
large donation (as much as $20,000) to their church on behalf of the
suspect,
but the suspect never produces any such donation,” Woodson continues. “Then, the suspect asks
his victims to give
him a few thousand dollars (as much as $7,000) of their own as a
good-faith
gesture.”
He explains the gesture shows the donors are trustworthy and will not keep the man's money for themselves. Usually, someone else contacts the marks to confirm the con's Beverly Hills inheritance story.
Once he gets money from his victims, the con man disappears and his marks figure out they were duped.
The only description of him is he is black.
Westminster Police hope getting the word out about the scams will cause others to come forward and that clues to his identity will be developed.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.