It took an article in the Los Angeles Daily News to draw our attention to an $80,000 scam that has targeted students of Pierce College and other colleges in the San Fernando Valley for about a year.
According to the Aug. 1 article entitled, “Students bilked for $80,000, cops say,” officials say they began to receive complaints from students at Pierce, Valley College and California State University, Northridge about a year ago. They had reportedly been duped into giving the scammers money and cashing their forged checks in exchange for a few hundred dollars and a job.
Despite the case detective stating there may up to fifteen more scammers hunting for unwary students, there have been no warnings issued on the campus, or to the students in any way.
The Pierce sheriff’s office said because the scammers met up with the victims at their personal banks to carry on the next phase, it was an LAPD matter. The LAPD is handling the investigation and has made arrests, but they said there should definitely have been some sort of warning issued to students on campus.
The detective said warnings were issued at CSUN and Valley, possibly preventing students from being deceived and then arrested at their banks for attempting to cash fraudulent checks.
This isn’t the case at Pierce. Robert Garber, Pierce president, said he was never made aware of the victims’ complaints, but if he had been, an email would have been sent out by the same system that delivers registered students and staff campus alerts such as registration deadlines and parking tips.
Avoiding a scam is largely the responsibility of the approached student. But what if violent crimes are occurring on campus that nobody has been alerted of?
The most current crime statistics posted on the Web site of the Pierce sheriff’s office are from 2005, and the weekly crime logs stop after Aug. 13, 2007. Just one click away from the “Statistics” page is a description of the Jeanne Clery act, formerly known as the Crime Awareness and Campus Security Act of 1990.
The act, named in memory of a 19-year-old university freshman who in 1986 was raped and murdered in her residence hall at Lehigh University, mandates publicly available annual crime statistics and timely warnings of campus threats.
If the updated statistics are made available and scam warnings are issued, the sheriff’s office will be doing its part to protect students from future scams. The rest is in the students’ hands.
(Jessie Lomeli)