JACKSONVILLE, AR – Potential theft is always on the minds of store clerks like Tiffany Smith, but Saturday (2/14) night, the T-Ricks convenience store where she works in Jacksonville was taken for more than a thousand dollars by someone that never set foot inside the door.
She says a guy named “Richard” called, claiming to be with the prepaid minutes company with which they do business.
“He said he was I.T.,” Smith insists.
T-Ricks had been having trouble with the machine, so Tiffany didn’t think anything of it when “Richard” asked to test the service by crediting prepaid phone cards and giving him the PIN.
Tiffany complied, just thinking she was doing the right thing and helping fix a problem.
She said, “The minute I got off I spoke to my manager and she’s like ‘Oh, no’.”
Store Manager, Renee Lavigne said, “Since that time I have been on the phone hours and hours.”
“Richard” was able to scam the gas station out of 12 prepaid PIN numbers, all worth a little more than $1,000, without paying a dime.
Now those minutes are being sold and even you could have some of them.
We called one of the phone numbers ourselves. It’s listed in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
“They told my mom ‘We got them, you can buy them off me’ and that’s what she did,” explained the person who answered the number we called.
She says her mother bought the minutes from someone on the street, not thinking they could be stolen from a store all the way back in central Arkansas.
“I feel horrible because it happened and I did it,” Smith adds. “I do take responsibility because it is my fault that it happened. [Richard] did know a lot about it, what he was talking about, which really made it believable.”
Lavigne and Smith want to warn people that something like this can happen. They’ve filed a report with police and are trying to get their money back but aren’t sure if that’s possible at this point.
