A man gets an MRI and swipes a wallet in the process; an elderly woman is told she won $5.5 million and pays the price; and this time it’s a Macy’s employee who steals a credit card. It’s this week’s police blotter.
If you follow the blotter like I do, the Fulton St. Macy’s seems a hotbed of activity—specifically, that of unguarded pocketbooks and the perps who pounce on them like lions on gazelles. But this week’s report is a little different: here, a man left his credit card behind after making a purchase; the sales associate then went and charged $341.88 on it. When the man’s wife showed up to claim the card, the associate offered to cover the costs by giving her $300 in cash. She was unappreciative; he was arrested.
Around 1 p.m. last Friday on Willoughby and Lawrence, a man was approached by a thug who used the old, “Don’t I know you from somewhere?” Now, normally I think of it as used in bars, not on Willoughby and Lawrence, but it got him talking—talking specifically about a $200 princess-cut diamond ring he was carrying. The thug then opened his mouth, pulled out a razor blade, and demanded the ring, which he got, along with $300.
On Bond Street Wednesday night, a thief or thieves entered a home through the roof hatch and made off with a $25,000 Yurovitsky violon. It was insured.
A man left his wallet in his locker at the Atlantic Avenue YMCA and locked it, but when he returned an hour later it was gone.
Two burglaries in two consecutive days at 68 Jay Street—the first was Wednesday evening, when a thief swiped two laptops worth $3,600 from a production company. The second was Thursday morning when a company called Project Energy Savers lost $3,250 worth of camera equipment.
A man getting an MRI at Doshi Diagnostic Imaging last week somehow managed to swipe the wallet from the man performing the MRI. Cameras were on more than body parts there, however, as the thief was caught on film and arrested by Officer Mraz.
The last case is one which I will call “Sorry, wrong number.” It began when a woman who has power of attorney over an elderly lady’s finances noticed there were some bizarre checks for high amounts written to strange people. When she asked what this was about, the lady informed her that she’d received a phone call telling her that she’d just won $5.5 million. (Can you already see where this is going?)
The only hiccup was those pesky processing fees: $2,000, $3,000 and $5,000.
The report didn’t go into specifics, but I imagine the woman hearing this news said, “That’s wonderful, now don’t mind me, I’m just going to dial 911.” The police showed up and the woman called her contact; when he heard the police were there, he told her that he was a U.S. Marshall and the police were frauds. He then called her Oppenheimer Account and tried to get them to wire him her money. Those darn Oppenheimer folks though, they ask for proof.
The police traced the calls to Jamaica (the island, not Queens), and as of the day of the report hadn’t arrested the contact, though they did have the names and information of the people who received the “processing fees.” So if there’s a takeaway from this, If you win $5.5 million, just wait for your giant check to be delivered to your door with balloons and free magazine subscriptions—don’t pay any processing fees. And that’s this week’s blotter.
