Angel Germain College student trip scam Indianapolis Indiana Nationwide

On the evening of Aug. 29, 2014, a young woman matching descriptions posted elsewhere on this site came to our door in Indianapolis with the story that she is an aerospace engineering student at Purdue University.  She claimed, simillarly to other stories posted about a woman almost certainly her, that she and a group of engineering students were trying to raise the last $10,000 needed for them to travel to Seattle, WA to work on the restoration of a P-51D WWII fighter aircraft that had been "recovered from the Baltic."  She claimed that her retired Marine father had contributed $4500 to the cause but had told her she had to raise the rest of her share on her own.  She claimed that her parents lived on a nearby street in our neighborhood.  I am a private pilot and experienced in many aspects of aviation, and certain parts of her story rang false.  We had two guests that night, and all our Scam Alarm bells were ringing.  We questioned her at length, and while she was glib and well-rehearsed, it was not hard to find soft points in her story.  My wife told her that if she could produce documentation of her story, we would help, but she could not show anything except a plastic-covered brochure about book packages.  She claimed to be selling book packages that would be given to the Riley Children's Hospital for distribution to the kids.  We were to pay $61 (!) and the students were to get $46.  She claimed to be far behind in getting the funding, and she pushed for a payment that night. From the descriptions in the Ripoff reports, this young woman appears to perpetrate similar scams all over the country.