Shelf Awareness passed on a letter written to them from Carin Siegfried, the Baker & Taylor rep for New England and upstate New York reporting on a new scam hitting several bookstores. Hopefully we can help pass this news to more readers to help make bookstores aware of the problem.
“In the last month or so, I know of three stores hit by those perennial scam artists who call using the TDD operator or e-mail, asking for large quantities of expensive books, using a stolen credit card that initially goes through but later is charged back. These scam artists have gotten smarter, no longer ordering hundreds of bibles but instead ordering 20-30 copies each of three or four different textbook titles. They refuse to give out their phone numbers, and their name does not match the name on the card (which of course one can’t determine over the phone or Internet without a call to the credit card company).
Fortunately the three stores caught the scam before shipping out the books, but one had paid for next-day delivery from our West Coast warehouse on some very heavy books and was out a small fortune on freight costs. Two of the booksellers are fairly new store owners, so they hadn’t read articles on this topic.”
Tags: Bakrer & Taylor, book orders, bookstores, scam, scam artists, Shelf Awareness
