Take Away Her Computer

Bless her heart, this lady may be sweet as can be, but she needs to stay away from high technology.

...a single mother in Daphne...was visiting a Yahoo! chat room in October when she got a note from someone calling himself Michael Stevens.

"He said he was a Marine who just got back from Iraq," said the woman, who asked that her name not be used because she hadn't told her relatives, several of whom are veterans. "I thanked him very much and told him I appreciated him protecting our country."

After a couple weeks of messages, "Stevens" told the woman he was heading to Africa briefly for some sort of job. Then he needed her help to get home. He was being paid with cashier's checks drawn on a U.S. bank and couldn't cash them overseas, he said.

Claiming he was an only child whose parents had died, he wanted to send the checks to her so she could cash them and wire the money back to him. Without the money, he told her, he couldn't pay his hotel bill and retrieve his passport or buy a plane ticket.

A $3,200 cashier'scheck arrived. The woman took it to her bank, which accepted it and cashed it. Then she wired the money to Africa.

"Stevens" said it wasn't enough, that his bills had increased. He sent her a bundle of money orders totaling $3,880. Again, she went to Western Union and wired the money, and again it wasn't enough.

"I said, 'You know, it sounds to me like they're robbing you,'" the woman recalled telling the supposedly stranded Marine. "'You need to go to the U.S. Embassy and they'll help you."'

"Stevens" promised to do so after he tried once more to pay off the hotel. A third envelope arrived, this time with $6,750 in money orders. The woman wired the money again.

She was about to send the confirmation number for "Stevens" to pick it up, when she opened an envelope from her bank. Inside was the $3,200 cashier's check and a letter warning her not to try to cash it again because it was fake and that she would be liable for the money the bank had given her.

The woman rushed to stop the last wire transfer, which Western Union allowed her to do, for a fee, she said. After emptying her savings account, she now owes the bank about $2,100, a significant sum, especially for someone on a modest income.

"It's very hard to accept," she said, sobbing, "that I can't provide for my youngest son." That the criminal posed as a military man "just makes my blood boil," said the woman's lawyer, Michelle Hart.