Subleasing scam lures students

A new scam involving fake money orders is luring in IU students hoping to sublet their apartments.\nFourth-year law student Nancy Woodworth faced that dilemma this summer. She said she was dreading the thought of paying rent all summer in Bloomington while living in Chicago.\nSo Woodworth felt lucky when she got an e-mail response to her ad on www.IUcribs.com from a woman in the UK, offering to pay three months rent up front with a money order.\n"It sounded legit to me," she said. "I thought the money order would be real. For some reason I thought they were guaranteed by the bank."\nHowever, Woodworth soon became suspicious of the situation. The woman wrote urgent e-mails, saying her father suffered a stroke, and funds had been raised to help with medical bills. She requested that Woodworth cash the money order, keeping the amount for rent, and sending the rest to the UK.\n"She was supposed to send $1,500 for three months, and she sent $4,500 while I was supposed to send the difference," Woodworth said. "My friend had a similar scam on eBay when her boyfriend tried to sell his \nmotorcycle so that tipped me off they would be fraudulent."\nWoodworth's suspicions were confirmed when she took the money orders to the Bloomington Post office where she discovered they were indeed forged. \nSince the first incident, Woodworth has received two other similar offers for the summer, and said many of her friends have also been sent the scam.\n"You have to be wary of someone you don't know and haven't even met who is willing to send you $4,000 and trust you to send them money back," she said.\nChris Sevinish, customer service supervisor for the Bloomington Post Office, said they have seen an explosion of this type of scam. \n"This has really taken off in the last six or eight months," he said. "We rarely saw counterfeit money orders before, and now every office in Indiana has seen them."\nSevinish said clerks are trained to check security features -- like watermarks -- but when someone receives them they look valid. \n"There are various scams about sublets," he said. "Typically they are from foreign countries like Nigeria and the UK."\nThe post office has discovered about 50 frauds in recent months, and Sevinish said most of those have had to do with sublets.\n"I haven't seen one of those types of scenarios that is valid," he said.\nIf a fake money order does get cashed, at the post office or a bank, the person who cashed it is liable, whether or not they thought it was real.\n"If a money order is cashed and the money is spent and can't be paid back, the person involved is liable," said Tracy Bastin of Fifth Third Bank. "The bank would have to take legal action."\nBastin said though she had not heard of the subletting scam, it sounds similar to scams involving the lottery and eBay.\n"It's a new twist on an old scam," she said. "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is." \nThough Woodworth discovered the scam in time, she said she had to scramble to find a legitimate sublet during finals week. \n"I would love if these people were caught," she said. "But I doubt if they ever will be."\nOfficials for IUPD and the Bloomington Police Department said they were unaware of the scam.