May 24, 2007
Fairfax Police: Bring It On
The new face of crime
NBC4 provides the details. Apparently 19 year-old Tasha Mitchell is in the habit of going door to door pretending to be the lead cheerleader for a local high school. She uses the ruse to solicit checks from credulous residents. There's no indication of exactly how she gets the residents to make out the checks to her instead of the school, but we wouldn't be at all surprised if it involved a sob-story about getting cheated by Sparky Polastri. It's likely that overall perkiness also plays a factor.
Perhaps this is an unfair smear on a sport that's merely stupid, dangerous and sexist. After all, there's no indication that Ms. Mitchell is familiar with round-offs, broken high Vs, table tops or anything else about being a cheerleader. But the peppy tenacity she shows for her craft indicates that she might make a good one: the NBC4 article says that she's gotten busted for the same routine nearly a half-dozen times, including once just three days before her most recent arrest in Fairfax.
The article also warns that there's a young guy going around soliciting donations for nonexistent lacrosse teams, so don't rely on the absence of a cheerleading backstory as proof that you're not getting scammed. All in all, this is just another reason never to give money to charitable high school causes under any circumstances, no matter what. Well, except maybe the dance team — let's face it, they deserve your pity.
Image adapted from an image by Danton pix, used under a Creative Commons license
|
Wow. I wasn't ever a cheerleader, but I'm not sure why you felt the need to add that the sport is stupid and dangerous. I don't recall seeing disclaimers like that in posts about other sports that could definitely be considered one or both.
Time for a pep rally at the Fairfax County Adult Detention Center.
This is a news story, but the kids selling candy bars for their fake schools or other made up reasons never seems to get any attention.
Of course, there is no reason to even go through all that trouble, just sit on the ground (or more accurately splay yourself on the ground so that you block everyone's path) outside the Capitol South Metro station every afteroon and mumble for money. Seems to work well for the women I see out there every day.
SWester: Groups of chocolate bar kids get picked up in the projects by mini-Fagins and dropped off around town (Georgetown, DuPont Circle, Eastern Market, etc.). Kids get to keep $1 for every candy bar they sell, but end up eating some and getting paid in chocolate. I once tried to trace the phony anti-drug nonprofit listed on the candy wrapper but got no further than a non-working phone number in Chicago.
I'm sexy, I'm cute,
I'm scamming you, to boot!
Yeah, I don't really see how this is big news. I get hit up by kids all the time for money, either claiming they're with United Way, are trying to raise funds for football uniforms, etc. As far as I can tell, they're all scams. Besides, who in their right mind would send kids out to fundraise at random times on metro platforms, on the streets, in Union Station, and so on? I even got hit up by one kid in the Costco parking lot. That was some pretty smart marketing.
Has anyone seen the guy near Farragust West metro at 18th & K who is always agressively soliciting people for some charity? Can he be arrested?
this sounds like a movie i downloaded once...
These scams are made possible by the so-called legitimate fund-raising schemes that pressure you to spend too much on something you don't want, relying on your sympathy for the kid selling it or the cause. School or PTA officials who send kids out to hawk this junk should be convicted of child abuse.
If you get the candy bar that you pay for, is it really a scam? I mean, if the kid just hits you up for money claiming he's with a charity, that's one thing- but if he/she is selling chocolate for the "Karl Rove Little Over Achievers" and you actually get the bar I don't see the rub. Corporations do it all the time- "We're donating x% to blah blah". It's all a marketing ploy. I'm gonna give the next kid I buy a candy from a job.
Cheerleading is stupid and dangerous and sexist?
I always suspected DCist was run by communists; now I've got proof.
re: SWester
I've lived on the hill for about 6 years, and the woman you refer to has been in the neighborhood for atleast that long. I first encountered her on Penn Ave in the summer of 2001. I've talked with her since then about how long I've seen her begging for change and why she does it.
All she tells me that it's hard on the streets. But I know she doesn't live on the streets. She gets groceries (milk and eggs) from someone in the neighborhood each Sunday; this means she must have a fridge.
I understand that it's hard for many to make ends meet. It's hard to get by on small pay and the expensive living conditions we have here in the District. I struggle with wondering whether the street begging is a second job (she won't say), or a lucrative full time business that's been that way for 6+ years.
Another scam artist who begs for change around the city is the guy who poses as an electric/phone repair man, on a cell phone who says he forgot his wallet in a work truck and just needs a dollar to get on a bus. He fooled me once on Penn Ave. Then I saw him a year later with the same story in the same spot. I told him he fooled me the last time, he didn't take too kindly to it. I've seen him more recently at the Farragut West Station. When I asked him why he does it, he got very defensive and said that it's really hard to find work and keep a job.
What this girl is doing is wrong. As a coach, I am always trying to find reasonable ways to help my kids raise money for things like warm-ups and mats. The schools and booster programs are set up to force you to fundraise so that your program can be properly equipped. It's upsetting that one person can derail the legitimate efforts of many and would choose to use this story as justification to insult hundreds of thousands who enjoy this sport.
I find it somewhat amusing that the situation which might actually compensate the kid directly (either in cash or chocolate) is considered a scam, but the situation where the kid is basically unpaid labor for a large non-profit or even government entity is legitimate. I'm not denying that it's true, mind you, but I'm not sure how much more I approve of a "real" guilt trip as a tactic for getting me to be candy than a "fake" one.
And Girl Scouts have been pushing their cookies in Costco (and other shopping center) parking lots for years now, Jaybeas, so I wouldn't consider that location to be any kind of "scam" red flag.
There's another scam artist who lurks around the Silver Spring / Takoma Park area. You'll probably run into her during the evening rush, and she'll try to hit you up with some small talk before telling you that she locked her keys in her car and she needs $50 for a cab ride back to Laurel. She carries a briefcase and wears a suit that she probably purchased at a thrift store somewhere.
I told her to ask the cops to help her with her car and she said they wouldn't for some reason. I gladly offered her $1.25 for the bus but she turned it down. Then she went on a tirade calling me a hypocrite, since I was attending Catholic U. at the time, and that must mean that I am required to be overtly generous towards strangers. Mmmhmm.
Watch out for this woman, and don't let her trick you!
Speaking of girl scouts. At my college, this mom brought her kids to campus one year posing them as girl scouts. Of course she only accepted cash payments. Let's just say lots and lots of people were fooled and this woman walked away with tons of money.
So the girl was in Potomac, MD, telling people she was raising money for Riverbend, which is near Fredericksburg? Maybe she should invest some of that scam money in a map.
Obtaining $6 for a $1 item for fraudulent reasons is indeed a scam. Matter of fact, all these groups that solicit in DC without a Charitable Begging License (or whatever they call it) is also a crime. Worst crime: teaching kids that business operates this way.
So the girl was in Potomac, MD, telling people she was raising money for Riverbend, which is near Fredericksburg? Maybe she should invest some of that scam money in a map.
Yeah, you'd think these scammers would check their stories for geographical plausibility.
Earlier this week, this guy came up to me as I was leaving the U Street metro station and claimed he needed money for a bus ride so he could get to the Central Union Mission before it closed its doors for the night.
From where we were, Central Union Mission was maybe four blocks away.
Mike, I hate to break it to you but business DOES operate that way. You buy low, and you sell high, and you frequently do so by coming up with some non-rational reason that people should prefer your product to others. Sometimes that non-rational reason is a brand name or logo, or a celebrity endorsement, or an affiliation with a completely unrelated product. Other times it's an appeal to the purchaser's charitable nature.
When the cause is fake and the workers are unlicensed obviously it's a scam (and I don't think anyone here tried to claim that it wasn't), but that doesn't mean that the basic underlying transaction is fundamentally different from the way most consumer sales work in the contemporary economy.
Nate: Counterfeiting logos, making fraudulent claims, etc., is not how business operates - at least, not for long. If you mean crime and legitimate commerce operate in the same economic universe, well, no one claimed otherwise.
I'm not sure how counterfeiting logos entered the equation, because that's not at all what I was talking about. All I meant is that a huge number of transactions are based on the basic model: "product at wholesale price" + story = "product at retail price." Sometimes that "story" is in the form of a well-known logo, sometimes it's in the form of a beloved celebrity trying to persuade you that they use the product and therefore you should to, and sometimes that story is outright fraud.
Here's an example: the ads that Axe Body Spray was running a few years ago were obviously "claiming" that their product would cause women to go crazy and tear off the clothes of young, geeky men who wore it. Since they made this claim visually and anecdotally rather than in text, and because they are legally licensed to sell the product, there was nothing at all fraudulent about their efforts, but at its core I think it's pretty much just as dishonest as the kid who comes up to you on the Metro and claims that buying his candy bars will "keep kids off drugs."
Ah, Nate: Didn't know you were still at this. The scam I looked into had candy bar labels with the message that money from sales went to a non-existent anti-drug program. The kids were taught to repeat this lie by the older neighbor who hauled them around.
IMHO even a legitimate church or PTA that sends kids door-to-door or around town (without a license) to hawk $1 candy bars for $6 isn't much better, and offers kids a poor lesson in economics and a worse retail experience.