A Tutor Who Got Scammed

Hello,

My name is Luciano and a scam that I fell for has the potential to have calamitous effects on my financial situation. I will add a TL;DR to this intro, and a more detailed explanation of what happened down below.

TL;DR:

I am a tutor on a tutoring website. I met someone that I thought was a potential client, got scammed, reported it, and am now almost 2K in the red on my bank account. I need help so that I can continue to use my card and hopefully still be able to pay rent in two weeks.

The Backstory:

I tutor students on Wyzant, a popular tutoring website, and I met a parent we'll call K on it at the end of last month. After speaking with K for a while it seemed that we were a good fit and contact information was exchanged. He told me that he was going to mail me the check, which was unusual but I believed that he was just old-fashioned. That was a mistake.

A few days later the check arrived, and I deposited it. At that point, he had already told me that there was a mistake on the check and that there was more in the check than there needed to be. He asked if I could deposit some of the check into the PayPal of his nanny, whose wages were included in it. I opted to believe him and do just that since I didn't want to upset the livelihood of someone else who almost certainly lived paycheck to paycheck. He thanked me for that, and we scheduled our next meeting. Due to what I had believed amounted to crossed wires as far as schedules go, we hadn't been able to meet up at the same time.

The very next day he informs me that his son was taken to the hospital due to what they believed to be COVID and was diagnosed with pneumonia. He asked if he could get the rest of the check back, and that tutoring was going to be put on hold. I, having had health issues myself this past year, decided not to press him on what was surely a sensitive issue and do as asked. This was yesterday (November 17th).

That night I received an email from Wells Fargo informing me that my bank account was over one and a half thousand dollars overdraft. When I went to check my bank account online I saw that the check that had been deposited was marked as pending return, which I immediately realized meant that the check was somehow fake or was being returned to the sender. This was after I had sent the money to someone, almost certainly the very same figure who had sent me the check-in the first place, through Pay Pal.

What I Did Next:

The first things I did were report the involved transactions to Pay Pal and Wells Fargo. I spent over forty minutes on the phone, twenty-five of which were spent with a very kind call-person named Ernie who works for Wells Fargo, explaining the situation. At the moment it seems that there will be an investigation of some sort through them. I also reported the situation to Pay Pal, and plan on seeing if I can call someone there today. I will also be notifying Wyzant about this, so that they can ensure that K does not reach out to other tutors and attempt to scam them as well.

What Happens Next:

I created this GoFundMe to go help me get out of the red. I live paycheck to paycheck and while I am hopeful that some of the money I owe will be reimbursed to me in the wake of an investigation, I currently cannot purchase anything or else I risk my bank account freezing and, of course, owing even more to the bank in the form of fees. This is a critical situation and a genuinely terrifying one.

I was also told to tell the police about this and plan to do that as well. The amount I need to raise is a little under two thousand dollars, as the check I had gotten was just under nineteen hundred and I am also adding the overdraft fee I am sure to have to pay.

How You Can Help:

You can help by sharing this campaign around, donating to it, donating to my CashApp ($LucianoTheWriter), and my PayPal (link here). Of all of these sites, I prefer CashApp because it's the fastest and won't take a few days to get into my account (which is the case with Go Fund Me), but I wanted to create this page to have a place where I summarized my story somewhat succinctly. Any and all donations can truly help make an incredible difference, and if you can help I will do my best to personally thank you for the assistance.