Walmart Fraud Ellsworth, Maine

Your son got scammed but it was not Walmart's fault.

Here is what happened.  Your son answered an ad(probably on Craigslist).  He e-mailed this person and was given a "story" of how they were stuck in another city(or country), perhaps they claimed to be a member of the Military stationed overseas.  They give some other excuse as to why your son can't go IN the apartment, but say that they will give them a real good deal because they are short on time.  To "speed things up" they say just go to Walmart and get a GreenDot card and give them ALL of the infomation on the card and receipt.  Your son does this, gives them the information and never hears from them again.

I would bet that this sounds familiar.  The reason it does is because scams like this have been going on for decades.  They have different variations, and while this one used a GreenDot card others use Money Orders or having the person send a Western Union money gram.  The reason is that ALL of those methods are untraceable.

Also any other information they gave you is fake as well.  The names were fake.  If you called them the phone was actually a throw-away cell phone.  The unit actually belongs to someone who has no idea of the scam.  The house/apartment was probably recently up for sale or rent through legitimate means and these scammers just copied that information from the Internet.  Oh and yes they are in a foreign country but don't need to be an Walmart employee to know about this.

One final thing.  If he did in fact get the listing from Craigslist, they have warnings ALL over their site warning of this exact scam.  So if he missed that, he would have also missed any warnings on the GreenDot card as well.

Your son gave financial information to someone he never met for an apartment he never saw. You cheated him by failing to teach him some common sense. Apparently you don't have much sense either because you blame Walmart and you foolishly posted your phone number on a public site.

How is your son getting ripped off by someone fraud on walmart's part? Did you call the police on fabian and file a police report for theft? Did you contact the apartment your son was supposed to be renting? While walmart's method of dispensing a green dot card may not be the safest, I don't see how walmart is responsible for your son getting ripped off. Even if he had gotten the card before giving this guy the money, he still would have been ripped off. Even if the number was somewhere else, walmart needed to give you an activation number for the card. What your son did was give the criminal all the information they needed to steal the card, would it have mattered where they printed it?