Rochester woman out $12K in Facebook, ‘Workman’s Comp grant’ scam

By KAALTV

Rochester Woman Scammed out of $12,000

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(ABC 6 News) – A Rochester woman lost more than $12,000 over a month in a Workman’s Comp scam, according to police.

Capt. Casey Moilanen said RPD learned yesterday that an 83-year-old woman had been sending money to a Facebook scammer since November 13.

According to Moilanen, the woman told police she received a Facebook message from a long-time friend’s account, which said he had received a $10,000 Workman’s Comp payout and referred her to another profile.

Moilanen believes the friend’s account was hacked — but the woman didn’t verify the information through another messaging platform.

Instead, she messaged the second profile over Facebook and the scammer using that account told her to buy $1,000 in Apple gift cards and send him the codes so he could “process her information and see if she was eligible for the grant.”

We talked with Luke Werner the owner of Computer Resource Center in Rochester says a lot of these scam seem to happen around the holidays.

Werner says things to watch out for are “if someone is going to be asking you for gift cards, for money for your bank account information or anything like that just to be very skeptical about that because even friend or even emails that seem to legitimate tend not to be.”

Moilanen said any person requesting gift card codes is almost certainly a scammer.

The scammer told the woman she was eligible for a large grant, but he needed more money to process the request.

The woman sent six more Zell payments over the course of a month and a half before realizing she was being scammed Dec. 28, Moilanen said.

She’s out a total of $12,600, according to police.