A scammer targeted Oxnard-based Food Share. Here's what happened next

It began with a man promising to uphold his late father's dying wish.

He had reached out to the Oxnard-based Food Share on Jan. 10 at 5:44 p.m., asking how he could donate, signing off his email as Alphanso B. Blye.

Monica White, president and CEO at Food Share, responded the next day with condolences, details about the work they do and the different ways they can receive donations. Blye shared he had been traveling and had just returned to his base in Hong Kong. He wanted to send the donation via check and talk further about his father and "his deep interest for the environment."

White thought this was a red flag since Food Share provides hunger relief but shrugged it off, thinking he was likely emailing about many different donations at once.

White shared their mailing address and tax identification number. A week later, regional food bank received a FedEx envelope with a cashier's check for $178,000.

What she didn't know at the time was that Food Share was among dozens of organizations across California receiving similar checks from Blye. The gifts were meant to honor his late mother in some cases. It was the same story with minor differences.

Spotting the red flags

White was communicating with Blye over email and by phone. She called him late at night Pacific Time so it wouldn't be too late for him in Hong Kong.

She thanked him for the donation. He asked if the money had been deposited yet. Another red flag, White thought.

He added that they should discuss naming and recognition for his father the following week. Blye mentioned that his father was a successful businessman in California. White did a Google search to find mention of Blye and his father and found nothing. Another red flag.

Then she ran a search on social media site LinkedIn and found a post warning anyone receiving checks from Blye of a scam where he asked to send some or all the money back. Thirteen other people left comments that they were targeted as well, most of them from nonprofit organizations, according to their posts on the social media site.

White was grateful for the warning and was ready when she next heard from Blye. He copied Food Share on emails with a “financial director” who shared that an "erroneous mistake" had been made and they had overpaid.

The emails said that "the funds have been cleared into Food Share’s holding so can not necessarily be reversed" and requested that $100,000 be retained for the donation to Food Share and $78,000 be returned. The check never cleared but White said she played along to get the wire transfer information for where to send the money back to Blye.

She gathered the evidence and filed a report with the FBI. White said she and her team also talked to Ventura County Sheriff's officials who said that because it's not considered a local crime with Blye allegedly being in Hong Kong they should go through the federal policing agency.

She also sent out a message on a listserv and put out a post on LinkedIn warning other food banks and nonprofits. Eight different nonprofits reached out to her that week to share that the same thing happened to them. Luckily, none of them fell for it.

"We are very proud to be extremely good stewards of our donor dollars. Being vigilant against scammers like this is not something that I thought I was going to have to do in this job," White said.

With a yearly budget of $9 million, a $78,000 loss would not have closed their doors, but the Food Share team was disappointed by the scam.

'People try to do the right thing'

Sheriff's Detective Kevin Walters said that he hasn't been notified of check scams targeting nonprofits in Thousand Oaks, where he's based, but is not surprised that this is happening.

"A lot of times the unsuspecting person just wants to try and do what they think is the right thing. They'll pay the difference," Walters said. "In cases like this, if you get a check sent to you from someone you've never interacted with in person and they're saying that they wrote too much, and then you just send back a difference, it's almost always going to be a scam."

Walters, who specializes in fraud, forgery and financial crimes, said that his team is trying to prevent these scams by doing presentations with community groups and making themselves available to answer questions about these types of crimes and scams. They also pursue such criminals locally and recently arrested a fraud suspect who had been stealing donation checks from churches in the city.

The detective advises that instead of obliging requests to send back the difference, it is safer to contact your financial institution. The bank may freeze the check and even have its fraud unit look into it to determine if it is legitimate.

'Tricked for a second'

Another recent target was Juma, a nonprofit that operates businesses to employ young people. Adriane Gamble Armstrong, the CEO of the San Francisco nonprofit, said she received an email from Blye asking for information to send the check on Jan. 10.

She received the check a week later and on Jan. 22, he started asking for the entire $178,000 back saying there had been a mistake.

She said she would have needed a lot of documentation to make an outgoing payment, but she was "tricked for a second" and did consider how they would go about it. Still, she was cautious and realized it was a scam when the check never cleared. Eventually, Blye stopped calling.

"I think what also really was a big red flag was that he really started to harass me," Armstrong said. "In 12 hours, he called and texted me like 20 times to the point where I had to eventually turn off my phone. And it was supposedly between 1 and 4 a.m. Hong Kong time."

She added that $178,000 is more than a month of the nonprofit's operating expense.

Dena Jenson, the director of the Center for Nonprofit Leadership at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, was not aware of check scams targeting nonprofits in Ventura County. However, the team came across similar scams from other parts of the country and was tracking them as a potential threat.

Nonprofits would have to tap into their reserves to cover the cost of the fraud if they fell prey to it and an additional harm is the emotional toll and the wasted time and energy, she said.

"Our relationships with donors require a really high level of trust and communication," Jenson said. "So, the fact that bad actors are leveraging that really important relationship to scam nonprofit organizations, it hits really hard because organizations are doing such incredible work with oftentimes limited resources.”

Dua Anjum is an investigative and watchdog reporter for the Ventura County Star. Reach her at dua.anjum@vcstar.com. This story was made possible by a grant from the Ventura County Community Foundation's Fund to Support Local Journalism.

This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: A scammer targeted Oxnard-based Food Share. Here's what happened next