2 more B.C. animal charities targeted by scammer claiming to be 90-year-old ‘donor’

Two more British Columbia animal sanctuaries are coming forward after being targeted by a scammer posing as a big money donor.

It comes after a Richmond-based charity was targeted in the same scam — spending thousands of dollars of the supposed donation before they realized it was a fraud.

Diane Marsh, co-founder of the Happy Herd farm sanctuary in Langley, said she was overjoyed last month when a woman calling herself “Pamela Pear” reached out, offering a big donation from her recently deceased partner’s estate.

“She said I’m 90 years old, so I am not good at this, but she wanted to leave us $25,000 — which is huge for us — and she was leaving $70,000 for the care of her dog,” Marsh said.

It’s a sum Marsh said would have covered a year’s worth of bills for the little sanctuary which provides refuge for aging and unwanted farm animals.

“$25,000 for a sanctuary like ours is huge,” she said. “It was exciting to think somebody would care that much.”

Marsh gave the woman her mailing information, and several weeks later the cheque showed up in the mail.

But instead of being for $25,000, the sum was $95,000.

Marsh took the cheque to the bank, where an alert teller quickly flagged the deposit as suspicious.

The teller pointed out how the attached lawyer’s letter wasn’t on proper letterhead, the email address was a Hotmail address, not a business address, and the cheque had just one signature.

“All of these things were setting off bells. I’ve got my phone out, I’m Googling the lawyer — he doesn’t exist. I’m Googling his company, it doesn’t exist,” Marsh said.

“It was just the worst feeling in the world. You know, you’re so excited, and then you realize somebody is out there doing the worst thing possible.”

After calling the RCMP, Marsh began calling other sanctuaries to warn them about the scam.

Her first call was to SAINTS Recue, a sanctuary for senior and special needs animals in Mission.

They, too, had received the same cheque that very day.

“I have a suspicious mindset anyway, and we had in the last six weeks … a couple of other scams that … at first you might have thought they were legit, but they had made a few errors that caught our attention and that I caught, and they didn’t go through, so I think I was already had the mindset that something was a scam,” said SAINTS board director Sheila Kullar.

Kullar said she started to get alarm bells early in her correspondence with the scammer, but thought some of the communication issues could have been due to dealing with a 90-year-old donor.

But when the improperly configured cheque showed up with the same lawyer’s letter Marsh received, she quickly concluded it was fake.

“It was a really good scam because it is very plausible when you’re 90 years old you do get confused easy, you don’t understand the process anymore and it was a plausible story,” she said.

“If it had been $95,000, woo-hoo! We would have been ecstatic. We would’ve been able to use it, obviously, for our shelter. We could’ve used it for the new shelter that we’re putting renovations into; it’s expensive.”

Marsh said police later explained that if she had been able to cash the cheque, the scammer would then have reached out and claimed they’d only meant to send the original $25,000, and try and get the charity to send them back $70,000.

When the bogus cheque bounced, the charity would have been on the hook for the money it sent back to the scammer.

It’s the same technique used against Richmond’s Regional Animal Protection Society, and though they didn’t end up spending the $70,000 they did spend the $25,000 they thought they had received.

All three charities are now hoping to get the word out and ensure none of their colleagues become victims of fraud.

“I would just wonder what kind of mentality they have, you know, if that’s their life that they have to cheat a charity who’s trying to do good work and who lives off donations,” Marsh said.

“They’re cruel. They’re cruel. They should be in jail.”

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