A Brand New Scam

It seems like there is a new scam every day as the scumbags of the world look for ways to separate honest people from their money. Everything from callers claiming you owe money to the IRS or for your utility bill to those nice people in Nigeria who want to deposit millions of dollars in my bank account if I will just give them the account information. And let’s not even talk about all those beautiful, horny college coeds and bored, sexually frustrated housewives who want me!

But this week somebody hit me up with a new scam I had not heard of before. A few weeks ago I bought a new Kubota compact tractor with some implements to use here on our land. Kubota has a great deal on their new equipment that includes 72-month financing at 0% interest, which I was happy to take advantage of.

The other day I received an official looking letter telling me the State of Alabama Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) had recently filed a financing statement in my name, along with a bill for $90 due by February 10. For those not familiar with it, the Uniform Commercial Code is a set of laws governing commercial transactions in the United States.

Something didn’t seem quite right about it, because the nice folks at Kubota never mentioned anything about a UCC statement, so I did a quick Google search and learned that this is a new scam going on nationwide. Apparently, the crooks search public records for commercial transactions like mine and then send out these letters. Then I checked on the address. It came back to a UPS Store with private mailboxes on Vaughn Road in Montgomery.

After calling the folks at Kubota, who confirmed it was some kind of scam, I called the UPS Store and asked if they knew one of their customers was using their address to scam people. The woman I talked to immediately said, “You must be talking about the UCC thing. Yes, we know all about it.”

Huh? They know about it and still allow the scammers to use their address? She said it wasn’t them sending out the letters so they were not involved. Gee, what’s next? Can I sell drugs out of one of their private mailboxes? I would expect more from an established company like the UPS Store, but I guess I would be wrong.

In other news, we finally seem to be mostly over our colds, and we are leaving for Florida today to pick up the last of our stuff from our house there and get it ready to put on the market. Hopefully we can get it all wrapped up in a few days and get back here, with that chore behind us.

And finally, here’s a chuckle to start your day from the collection of funny signs we see in our travels and that our readers share with us.

Thought For The Day – I don’t trip. I do random gravity checks.