He ate buffalo wings and drank nine Blue Moon drafts at Burke’s Cafe. At Shucker’s, he washed down a pound of steamed shrimp with three glasses of Tanqueray Gin, two Coronas, a Heineken and a Johnny Walker Black Label scotch.
Day after day, year after year, Andrew Palmer dined at restaurants all over Baltimore and beyond, including Anne Arundel, Baltimore and St. Mary’s counties. He even traveled as far south as Florida and sampled restaurants there.
His tastes ran the gamut: a Chinese joint in Fells Point one day, the upscale Capital Grille at the Inner Harbor another.
Palmer ate modestly and drank aggressively. Restaurant managers described the 43-year-old as shabbily dressed but cordial and relaxed. He didn’t tip. Worse: He didn’t pay. To escape his bill, which was usually under $100, police said, he frequently feigned a seizure, was rushed to the hospital and then taken to a jail cell.
The scam sounded plausible at first. Who wouldn’t want 250 caesar salads?
Things didn’t get suspicious until the anonymous caller asked to overpay the bill by $1,100 — supposedly for the delivery service — and have the difference sent to Texas by Western Union.
That’s when the general manager of the Rocket Shop Cafe on South Union Avenue called off the order.
But orders continued to come in by phone for payment by credit card over the last few months. Next it was 250 chicken sandwiches with fries. As recently as this week there was an order for pulled-pork sandwiches with chips for 250 people.
The restaurant’s general manager, Michael Harmon, quit taking the orders for what the caller said were large events in town. The requests just didn’t make sense.
Restaurants in Minnesota and North Dakota are being targeted by scammers, according to the Better Business Bureau (BBB).
Two restaurants in the Twin Cities reported the scam to the BBB recently. According to the reports, the scammers use the Telecommunications Relay Service to place a call to a restaurant and place a large delivery order. The Telecommunications Relay is a service that helps people with speech or hearing disabilities to receive and make phone calls.
The con artists offer to pay for the order with a credit card. They usually ask to overpay and have the extra cash wired back to them, said the victims. The BBB said the credit cards are discovered to be stolen and the business looses the order funds as well are the money wired to the scammers.
The Better Business Bureau asks any business with concerns about a potential scam to contact them at 651-699-1111 or toll-free at 800-646-6222.
An Appleton woman’s attempt to extort $500,000 from an upscale Grand Chute restaurant was “crazy and outlandish” her defense attorney said Friday at her sentencing.
Debbie Miller will spend nine months in jail and four years on probation instead of collecting hush money after planting a rat in her lunch.
Miller, 41, was sentenced in Outagamie County Court for the 2008 incident at The Seasons.
She pleaded no contest in January to a felony extortion charge and a misdemeanor for obstructing police. She planted the dead animal in her food on April 17, 2008, before asking for the money in exchange for keeping quiet about the incident. She threatened to alert the media if the money wasn’t paid.
Police arrested Miller nearly three months later following an investigation conducted by the restaurant’s insurance company.
The Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office and the Maine Restaurant Association say someone has been calling Maine restaurants, trying to scam them out of money by saying that an employee has been arrested.
The caller claims to be a bail bondsman and says the employee got in a fight with her boyfriend, drove drunk, got in an accident and was arrested for OUI. The caller says the employee is too drunk to come to the phone. The caller then tells the person at the restaurant to wire money to a special account through Walmart to bail the employee out.
Boulder police are investigating an attempted catering scam that could have bilked one Boulder business out of nearly $1,000 and tricked its employees into making 150 chicken sandwiches for nothing, according to Boulder police spokeswoman Sarah Huntley.
The owner of Café Blue, 5280 Spine Road, told police on Saturday that his business had received a call about 3:50 p.m. from a person wanting to place an order for 150 chicken sandwiches, Huntley said. The caller, who was speaking through a language-translation line, said a delivery person would pick up the sandwiches later in the week.
The cost of the sandwiches was $1,080, and the caller asked the restaurant to charge a credit card for $2,000 and then mail a check for the difference to the delivery person who was going to pick up the food, Huntley said.
The Café Blue manager told the caller, “This sounds like a scam,” and the caller hung up, Huntley said. The manager called police because he recalled hearing about another Boulder business that had been scammed the same way.
In late July of last year, Chez Thuy, 2655 28th St., reported losing $4,750 in the catering scam.
In that case, a restaurant manager received a call from a hearing-impaired person who wanted to place a large food order for a wedding. The caller asked if the restaurant could pay a local delivery company on their behalf, because the delivery company wasn’t able to process credit cards. The caller said he would add whatever the restaurant paid for delivery into the total payment for the catering job, according to police.
An attempted larceny via credit card at Back Street Restaurant, 22 Center Street, was reported on Friday, March 5.
The owner of the restaurant received a phone call at the restaurant from a man who identified himself as James Fish through a deaf relay service, police said. He ordered 265 chicken Caesar salads, totaling $1,500, to be ready for pickup at 3 p.m. on March 15, police said.
Fish then requested that an additional $975 be charged to his credit card, bringing the total to $2,475. He provided a MasterCard number, and the purchase was approved and went through, police said.
The caller than asked if the $975 could be wired by Western Union to a residence in Fortuna, California. After that request, the owner became suspicious, hung up the phone, and called police.
Police believe the credit card was stolen and hadn’t been reported yet.
Someone representing themselves as a police officer tricked a manager at the Famous Dave’s restaurant in Kochville Township to wire $700 to an account in California to bail out a restaurant employee, Saginaw County sheriff’s Detective Sgt. Randy F. Pfau says.
The detective said someone called the restaurant, 5665 Bay, about 5:30 p.m. Sunday and identified themselves as “Sgt. Cooper,” Pfau said. The caller gave the manager the name of an employee who works at the restaurant and said the employee was in jail and needed $700 to make bail, he said.
The manager went across Bay to Walmart and wired $700 to a Western Union account in California, Pfau said. The called said the bonding agent the supposed employee was using was based in California, Pfau said.
Shortly after wiring the money, the manager realized the employee was not incarcerated, Pfau said.
A Michigan company doing business as Kentucky Labor Law Poster Service, The Mandatory Poster Agency, The Labor Law Poster Service and other names released a written rebuttal to claims against it made recently by a Radcliff restaurateur.
Kim Dennis, owner of Lee’s Famous Recipe Chicken in Radcliff, reported last week that the poster service — which sells employee rights posters to workplaces – tried to convince her to pay for a $67.25 set of posters that she’d not ordered.
Dennis contacted The News-Enterprise and Radcliff police about the unordered shipment being mailed to her restaurant after reading an alert by Kentucky’s Labor Cabinet that similar poster companies had been conning employers into paying for workplace posters that state and federal governments offer for free.
After refusing to speak by phone Thursday, the Lansing, Mich., poster company submitted its answers to allegations that it was part of any scam similar to what Dennis and state labor officials reported.
In the end it was just too big a coincidence to ignore. Several people with fraudulent charges on their credit cards had all eaten at the T.G.I. Friday’s in Coon Rapids and had all been waited on by the same server.
That server was arrested Thursday at his home in Coon Rapids, accused of skimming his customer’s credit card data on one scanner for his employer and on another for himself.
The West St. Paul Police department found the link between the victims and followed the path to Coon Rapids.
“Once we went up to T.G.I.Friday’s they reported that about a week and a half prior to when our first victim came forward that one of their portable scanners went missing,” explained Lt. Brian Sturgeon.
A local businesswoman says Hardin County has not been immune to a workplace poster scam reported Wednesday by Kentucky’s Labor Cabinet.
Mostly done via phone solicitations, labor officials claim scammers are conning employers into spending up to $89 for a set of state and federal workplace law posters. Warnings of potential fines are being used as a tactic to convince the business owners to plop down money for the posters, labor officials say.
Such posters are mandatory – since they advise employees of basic rights – but Kentucky and the U.S. Department of Labor provides them for free to employers and makes them available for download at their respective Web sites.
According to a Kentucky Labor Cabinet alert, the scammers are falsely telling employers otherwise – that the posters are no longer free.
A woman who attempted to extort money from an upscale restaurant by putting a rat in her lunch entered no-contest pleas Tuesday to two criminal charges.
Judge Dee Dyer found Debbie R. Miller, 43, guilty after she entered the pleas to a felony extortion charge and a misdemeanor for obstructing police. She will be sentenced March 8 in Outagamie County Court.
Miller planted a rat in her lunch at The Seasons on April 17, 2008, and then demanded $500,000 from the owners. She threatened to alert the media if the money wasn’t paid.
