Traveler Scams

Police say it is the season for traveling scam artists wanting to separate you from your money by pretending to fix your roof or driveway. Mobile Police recently arrested a man named Mark Johnson. They say he scammed 91 year old World War II veteran Fred McCallister out of eleven thousand dollars.

McCallister said they caught him off guard as he was working in his yard. And that's typically how these traveler's work. They'll stop at a home, usually of an elderly person. In this case, they convinced McCallister his roof was leaking by spraying some staining liquid near the ceiling of his home. They even claimed to have replaced a bent up vent on the roof--which was clearly not replaced.
"If it was a new one it wouldn't be like that," said McCallister.

Police said Johnson talked McCallister into writing a check for $7900, which Johnson cashed. But then he came back to McCallister's home and claimed he'd charged too much. He wrote McCallister what Johnson said was a company check for $7900 to reimburse him. Then asked McCallister for another check, this time for $4800. He cashed that one too. But the company check Johnson wrote was bogus, according to Sgt. Paul Soliere of the Police Department's financial crimes division. In the end, McCallister was out more than eleven thousand dollars.

"I'm not broke, but I don't want 'em to beat me out of my money," says McCallister.

Police say they don't really know how many of these gypsy scam artists are operating in this area. But they do know that over the past couple of years they've investigated perhaps 25 of these cases, all very similar. And they know that this is the time of year that you need to be on guard.

"Milder winters down here, they will come down here because they don't have to fight the cold and the snow in northern areas," says Sgt. Soliere.

Police sources tell us travelers who scam people throughout the country with bogus roofing and driveway paving jobs can make as much as 300 thousand dollars a year or more. There may be as many as 20 thousand of them across the country.

Soliere says there are many more of these crimes that go unreported because people don't realize they've been scammed or are too embarrassed to talk about it. But Fred McCallister doesn't mince words about what he'd like to see happen to the man who took his money.

"I'd hate to tell you on the tv what I'd do to them, but I tell you what, I'd castrate them," he says.