A Client Horror Story
That time when a client paid you with fake checks
Watch the full episode →Hey everyone, welcome to the latest episode of Client Horror Stories. I’m excited to have Mickey Kennedy with me today. How are you doing, Mickey?
Oh, I’m doing fine. Thank you.
Happy to hear that. And I love your glasses on the slow morning, your glasses are filling me with energy. Thank you. Let’s jump in. I have my coffee in hand, and I’m ready to hear all about your client horror story.
Okay. I’ve, uh, run a press release distribution business for the past 25-plus years, so I’ve seen a lot of horror stories come and go, a lot of people trying to take advantage of. Yeah. The media, PR, and things like that. So, there’s been a lot of little anecdotes along the way. We had a client who, I guess about 10 years ago, sent a release and had quotes with about their product by Tom Cruise and. It didn’t really smell right. So, I talked to the Newswire, ’cause all of our releases go over PR Newswire nationally. And I’m like, what do you make of this? And they’re like, I don’t know. And I said, circle back with them and ask, you know, if this is like a, a friend or a paid host or you know, paid celebrity spokesperson, trying to find out what the story is here, cause we’re we’re not comfortable either. And so I went back to the client. He’s like, oh yeah, that’s not Tom Cruise a celebrity. He goes, uh, I, I just looked in the phone book and found the Tom Cruise, uh, in Ohio and asked if I could attribute these quotes to him and I’d pay him like, I dunno, a few hundred dollars. And, uh, that’s hysterical. Yeah. And I was just like, and he goes, when this, after this one goes out, I’ve got a couple of other celebrities lined up, and I’m just like, yeah, I, I don’t think we can do that. And, uh, since then, the newswires have established, uh, protocols for mentioning celebrities. And so you can’t name drop celebrities as easily as you used to, and you certainly can’t attribute quotes and things like that to them without some kind of, uh. Actual proof. Uh, so that did, I think, contribute to some of the changes at the Newswire during the Katrina flooding. Years ago in New Orleans, there was a, uh, adult toy website that was sending out a release saying that an inflatable life partner had saved the lives of one of their customers. Oh. Uh, by floating to I, I guess I, I don’t know, uh, floating on it and to safety and, uh, again, it didn’t really feel right. I kind of felt like this is an accurate but that one we did run, uh, and we just said, you know, we’re not in the fact checking business and, uh, who, who’s to say, but it’s very unlikely that happened. But, uh, you know, lots of little interesting people throughout the years. But I think the biggest horror story was, um, it’s from 2002. And, uh, so I was only about four years old at the time and I got FedEx to me, a bank check, and it was for two press releases for, uh, a music, uh, conservatory that had just started up, um, in a state. And I sent the releases and guess about a week and a half later, my bank, uh, responded and said These were fake checks. So, you know, I looked at the person who had placed the order. It was the person behind the conservatory. I checked that, who is, and it was, it was him. And so I called and said, Hey, you know, we sent these releases. He goes, oh yeah, thanks. They’ve, they’ve been working great. And I’m just like, well, the problem is the check you sent is fake. And he goes, oh, well, um, yeah, that wasn’t me. That was my marketing company. And um, I’ve still got the FedEx uh, envelope. And I’m like, well, it came from you. All the names were you, the order was placed by you. But now there’s a, a marketing company I’ve never heard of. And, you know, we, we went back and forth. So I said, give me all the information about this marketing company. You didn’t gimme anything. And so I, I went to the police station. You know, they said that they don’t really investigate these things very much. They said, eh, if you know who it is, you can track ’em down. You can try to take ’em to the small claims court, whatever. By the way.
Awesome stories so far. I’m excited and nervous. To see, uh, to see what happens. One point I want to throw out there is I’ve done maybe 70 episodes of client horror stories before, and what’s interesting about someone sending a fake check is how flagrant it is like in almost every episode it’s ambiguous. Well, the invoice was a bit ambiguous. They’ll pay sale paid tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow. But this is like outright fraud. That’s that’s incredible. Right.
And so I, uh, then went back to the client and, and said, Hey, you know, I’ve opened an investigation. This is the name of detective. And he got nervous. And he goes, well, can I just give you a credit card, a number? And I said, sure. So I gave him the number. I called back to the police station and talked to that person and said, Hey, the person, my client paid me by credit card. So I guess you can just close this, but, and you’re like, okay. And they said we probably weren’t gonna do anything anyway. I, they said it was under, ’cause it was under a thousand dollars. They said it was very unlikely we were going to do much in the way of investigation. But uh, if there had been more reports we would add to it and, and proceed there. And about almost two months later, I got a chargeback for said credit card and no. Yes. So at that point I was just like, Ugh, I, I, this, this person’s terrible. And when you do a chargeback. It, it’s not just like you, you lose the money. They also usually dig you for $30 to $50 for, as a merchant fee, uh, for the chargeback and everything like that.
And, and it also goes on your, like your, uh, your bank account history.
Correct.
So like if there are a lot of chargebacks, you can then get your account canceled, et cetera.
Right.
Also, I had a point that might be obvious, but is worth saying, there’s the. Old saying like, fool me once, shame on you. Uh uh. Shame on you, fool me twice. Shame, shame, shame on me. Or actually, I’m gonna reverse it. I actually think the exact opposite, which is, which is he takes advantage of you one time, whatever. Okay. He fucked up. Maybe there was a marketing company, but like two times, like you can’t make a mistake like that two times.
Right. The, the funny thing was, I, I know a lot about domain names. Uh, I had launched my business under a different domain when I started and then I changed it to e releases.com . It was actually a suggestion of one of my writers, uh, ’cause I was like, I’m not happy with my domain name. So she had recommended ERE releases for electronic releases, and we were doing mostly by email at the time. I was like, oh, I like that. So I noticed that this person’s domain name for their new website was a.org, and it had a dash in it, which is just terrible, you know, number one, having dashes in a domain name, but then it being a.org as well, because people are used to typing in.com. And so I went and checked and the.org without the hyphen was available. And, uh, the, the versions of, uh, the domain name as a.com, with and without the hyphen, were available. So I registered all three and, uh, I pointed them at. A webpage where I just, uh, told my story. My lawyer said, just stick to the facts. Don’t make up anything. Don’t say, this person’s a crook. Jesus, this is my experience with working with this organization and this person, uh, this individual. And, uh, I posted all of that there. And, uh, I guess about a week or two later, his website just went dark. It just went offline. I, I, I don’t know what happened from that point. I think, if I recall correctly, he may have tried to start a new website. I, I don’t know. But, uh, just going through, you know, trying to find out the exact year in my research for this, I did find the original order. I looked up that person. And you know, today he works at a community college in it, and I was just like, you know, good for him. He, he’s still involved with music, with his church, but not anything like where he works, uh, in music or whatever. But I was just like, I don’t know, I, I just felt like I, you know, you, you, you defrauded me out of, uh, I think it was $600, $700 at the time. You just sort of dug in and, and still wouldn’t, you know, make it right and, and used even more fraudulent ways with the chargeback. It just really irritated me, but I really got a lot of joy out of, uh, redirecting all of these, you know, websites to a page about him. And I know that it must have made, you know, a really big impression as well. Another thing I did was I went to the Newswire and asked them to correct the URLs in all the press releases to my domain, and so all of these pages that used to point to his website were now pointing at mine, and so I think that that really just sort of blew up in his face and he didn’t know what to expect. That being said, I get chargebacks two or three times a year. They’re usually little fraudsters or I, I would say that’s not true. I’d say about half the time it is someone at the company didn’t know what this purchase was and the person who placed the order just needed to coordinate it. We get our money back almost in all those cases, but the other half are sort of jokesters or people just being fun and loose and, uh, thinking they can get one over on us by just doing a charge back. And, uh. I don’t even think about it now. I do not invest the time and energy now, but back then when I, my business was four years old and every dollar counted, having that happen to me, really, really got me upset. The guy also sent, uh, a FedEx overnight to me that I know those things cost $40, uh, you know, to, to overnight something. And, you know, he had invested in a website and all this other stuff. I just felt like. This wasn’t the biggest con in the world. I just don’t get why, why, why this person even tried.
Uh.
So..
Let’s, let’s try to deconstruct his, um, his mentality. So, so question out outside of him doing these, uh, uh, these chargebacks and, and the fake checks, were there any other red flags or yellow flags or anything notable about his, about his personality to have alerted you?
No, not really. He was very excited when I talked to him on the phone. A lot of people are nothing that really struck me, used his actual address to his house, used his actual phone numbers. You know, this, this person was just completely open with everything, but was trying to, when I talked to him to say that all of this interaction, which had I knew for 100% had been with him. ’cause I talked to him over the phone to later say that, no, this was the, the money was all handled by a marketing company for me. And I don’t know what he was thinking there because okay gimme the details of this marketing company and he is like, well, I don’t know. I just deal with him and, uh, here’s a Yahoo email address. I think that’s all I got out of him. And I’m just like, well, you gave him money. Did you sign a contract? I mean, what’s his website? And then it’s like that he just got all quiet. He didn’t really provide any additional information because I think at that point he hadn’t thought it through. But I don’t know, I just felt like, uh, it was, uh, I know that when people start businesses, they don’t have a lot of money. I know that you sort of can, uh, at times overextend yourself a little bit, but we were talking about just, you know, like I said, I think it was under $700, uh, for, for a couple of press releases. And it just, uh, it, it just, it just didn’t, you know, make sense to me. This person went through a lot of effort and a lot of energy to distribute releases that were very traceable to him, and then try to just spin a weird story. So…
there’s an exercise I, uh, I like doing with clients. I even wrote a book about this, which is when you deal with someone and they act stupid or like evil asshole. Uh, so if someone’s stupid or bad, let’s say, I always ask myself. What did they know that, I don’t know, that could explain this behavior. Like I think it’s too easy to say, yeah, this person’s stupid, or this person is a bad person. It’s harder to go through the exercise of empathy and to ask yourselves like, what do the world look like to this person? What could explain the, uh, this behavior? ’cause what’s, what of the interesting things about this case is in my experience with fraudsters. They try to hide it. Like, if you’re gonna do this, you’ll like, uh, you, you’ll, uh, you’ll use a, a different company name. Or like you, you don’t put in your own home address. You’re not so open about it. So this is what gives me a little bit of the benefit of the doubt to be clear, like so unfair, immoral, bad. But it’s interesting to me that no one thinks they’re the bad guy. Like the most immor bad people out there see themselves as the good people, and everyone else is the, is the asshole. So it’s, so, it’s an interesting exercise to try to reconstruct what, what such an asshole could, like, could have been thinking when, when, when, when he went through all this, right. And I, uh, and what also makes is interesting is, is in your follow-up research. Now 20 years later, you’re like, oh, he is working in a church. I wonder if this person, uh, went through some sort of religious revival and, and, uh, and changed himself another hand. A fraudster. Always a fraudster. Right. Right before our call, actually, I was just reading Genealogy of Morals by Nietzche and, and I just read book two of it and, and book two makes this really interesting argument about the importance of forgetting. He argues that one of the problems of modern society is people never forget anything. So because people never forget, you can’t really, you can’t like get over your past mistakes. You’re punished forever for your past mistakes. And what this, this, this leads me to speculate and this person being terrible. Like, like if someone did, did those things, these two things, not just one. And that’s just a fake check. A fake check, then, then, then a chargeback. I wouldn’t wanna kill him, maybe because it’s early in the morning and I just read some Nietzsche. I’m feeling a bit more open-minded and trying to see if we can dig in and figure out how he can like sleep at night, uh, and justify it to himself.
Just to speculate. Uh, it is interesting ’cause I hadn’t thought about the fact that he does list his church activities and being involved with the choir and the music department, uh, on his LinkedIn, that uh, maybe he has, you know, uh, turned, turned to God and maybe he has, you know, righted his ways. But I’m not sure. It’s funny. I mean, uh, in the grand scheme of things in my career. It was really important at the time. It really, really, really set me off. Uh, it just really, it, it really just angered me. I, I mean, at that time, 2002, when you received a, uh, bank check and it’s got, you know, it says official bank check and it looks like a real check. I just felt like, wow. I mean, I didn’t think people could do that, but now I realize you could just, you know, take paper and put it in a printer or whatever. Exactly. So, but at that time I was just floored at, uh, at how easy that was for someone to, to just do. And the funny thing is, it took my bank, I think a good week and a half before they realized this is a, a fake check. I think they’re probably faster now, but I do realize that there are still, you know, it’s usually a few days turnaround for something like that. But, um, it is interesting. I mean, I think that one of, one of the things that always has been a red flag in my business is when someone wants to pay by check, especially today, uh, you know, I, I have, you know, people every once in a while and say, can I pay by check and go, yeah, but we really discourage it and we’re not gonna move your press release or do anything until that check clears. And they’re just like, well, you know, we’re a business and we’ve, we issue checks. And I’m like. Yeah, but I also think that you probably got a company credit card in there, and that’s how the majority of the world, you know, works.
Yeah. And wires and, and buying transfers to me, I, I accept checks only from people who are about 65 and up, right? Like my parents live on their chequebook and I’m like, have you not discovered www.chase.com ?
Right. I will tell you, be careful with bank wires. I was at my bank. I was talking to them and I was talking to them about a bank wire I had done because I was, I was sending money to the UK to, it was a development company and they only wanted bank wires. You had to go and actually physically sit at the bank where now I could log into my, yeah, bank account and do it electronically. And I’m like, oh, this is so easy now. But, uh, one of the things I mentioned to them was. I have someone who’s been wanting to place a big order with me and they want to pay by bank wire. And she goes, well, you really wanna be careful. I said, why? And she goes, well, if you give them your account number and they have your routing number, they can just do a ACH and take money from you. And I was like, oh. I said, uh, would I get my money back? And she goes, you would? Unless you gave that to them and if you gave them bank wire instructions and they did that, you would be on the hook for that. She goes, you don’t have the same protections as consumers. And I was like, really? So if I give my, instruct my bank wire instructions, which include my account number, it is a different routing number, but she says, they, uh, she goes, it’s public. You could just look up, you know, uh, at the time it was SunTrust Banks and, uh, uh, you know, and, and the routing number is public information. And she says, so all he needs is that account number. So if you give him that account number for a bank wire, they can take the money from your account, and we would not put it back in. That would’ve been your mistake. And I was like, wow, I didn’t realize that. So I just try to do, you know, PayPals and, uh, any major credit card or debit card or anything like that. And, uh, occasionally I, I will take the occasional check mostly from people that I know and I’ve worked with over the years.
I had not known that, that freaks me out a little bit and definitely woke me up from my sleeping stupor in the first part of the podcast.
Yeah, she said that the, uh, commercial bank accounts are held to the, some kind of uniform code, and it’s not the same protections as, as personal accounts and that basically all the onus is on you when you give out your information. And I was like, okay, good to know.
Cool question. To wrap back, uh, back, back around to this, not this person who took advantage of you two times. Tell me about what, about how you’ve changed in response to this.
I think that the biggest changes I’ve made is, you know, we, we do vetting for all new customers that come on board, mainly because the biggest liability to my business isn’t someone giving me a, a bad credit card or, or something like that. It’s actually someone giving a fake press release and it materially affecting a company out there. We don’t work with publicly traded companies, so, you know, we, we, we hope that we won’t affect any stock prices or anything like that, but we, what we do, we check that the phone numbers that we reach people are the numbers that are posted online. We look at the who is of a domain name. We look at the history of the company and stuff like that. We do vet considerably more in regards to that. We really do discourage checks just because they’re just, they’re just inconvenient to deal with paper and processing and stuff like that. But outside of that, uh, I don’t think that we’ve made many more changes. I think that, you know, now, you know, there’s the occasional bite that we get here and there, but we’re doing, you know, 10,000 press releases a year. And, and like I said, we probably get six chargebacks a year. Half of them are just, you know, simple mistakes and the other half might be like fraudulent in a way. Um, so it’s just. Just the cost of doing business. I guess.
Okay. Uh, um, everyone goes through lesson, uh, lesson like this, where at, where at some point you realize, oh my goodness, we need to check to make sure the people that that are, that are hiring us are, um. Are, are, are not, not fraud, not fraudsters or uh, or otherwise. And being able to identify and avoid sketchy people is 90% of the battle
Right now, I will tell you an interesting story is that, uh, we used to get, uh, press releases promoting, uh, cryptocurrencies and, uh. We got a lot of chargebacks. Uh, I think with the first like 10 cryptocurrency press releases from 10 different individuals, I think half of them came back as fraudulent credit cards and, uh, they were just, you know, trying to promote these cryptocurrencies. And so we just quit ticking cryptocurrency press releases the Newswire came back to us about six months later and said, yeah, we’re not accepting cryptocurrency press releases either. And I was like, yeah, we had already stopped bringing, sending them about six months ago. Uh, they said that they encountered lots of fraud, uh, people promoting cryptocurrencies. That turned out they had no tie to it other than maybe they own some and wanted to promote it. And, uh, a lot of the online websites that represent a cryptocurrency. Some of them will tell you who’s behind it, but a lot of ’em don’t. And so when someone comes forward and says, yeah, that’s my platform and this is our cryptocurrency and here’s a press release about it, you kind of have to just take their word for it, cause you can’t really easily verify it. And so we just quit taking, uh, those types of press releases, uh, just just because of the fraud involved with the payment.
Wow. You know, I, I have this instinct to me, whenever I hear a stereotype about any group, I have this instinct where I always want the stereotype to be false, no matter what it is. I have like an anti stereotype instinct, so I. So when I hear all the stereotypes about crypto guys being fraudsters, I have instinct. No, no, no. It’s, it’s just a racist stereotype and so it’s a little, it’s blackens my heart just a little bit. So like, okay, there might be a touch of truth to this one stereotype.
Yeah, I, I, I mean, there may be legitimate people out there, but also at the end of the day, my perspective, I’ve never really done much in crypto. I just say to myself, there’s really nothing backing that, uh, you know, there’s, there’s nothing behind it. And everybody goes, well, there’s nothing behind the US dollar. And you know, the more I’ve learned about, you know, the economy and the world, that’s not necessarily true. I mean, we have a very strong backing of the dollar with our military might and the fact that two thirds of all, uh, international trading takes place in dollars. Uh, you know, China, Russia, all these places traditionally have done in dollars. Now they’re in a, in a cru uh, a situation where they can’t easily trade dollars or at least Russia. But it is interesting from that standpoint, I think there is, there is more behind the US dollar. I think as far as like, you know, it’s the US government, it’s, you know, the military, it’s, it’s everything that we have but with cryptocurrency, it’s, it’s just some dude created some digits, uh, and some binary digits, and people are just putting value on it. And, uh, I, I just feel like it’s, it’s, it’s ridiculous. I, I feel, I personally feel like, you know, if someone said, Hey, Mickey. I can sell you as many Bitcoins as you want for a thousand dollars, knowing that, I don’t know, they’re, what are they? They’re between 30 and 60,000 now. It’s always fluctuating around. I wouldn’t buy it. I mean, I would only buy it to dump it immediately and be really worried for that 15 minutes or couple of hours, however long it takes to buy it and get rid of it. But I, I just feel like there’s really nothing behind it other than this, uh, you know, techno geeky sort of scarcity that they’ve put on it.
Yeah, makes, makes sense. Um, Mickey, I’ve love your story of the, in the 70 episodes I’ve done so far of client horror stories. I think it’s the first one of such direct and outright, uh, outright Friday, not just once, two times. And I think this is an important reminder that every level, big or small, we always need to be smelling for watching for, uh, people who will, uh, uh, wanna try to take advantage of us. Any final thoughts before we wrap up today?
I don’t think so. I think that it’s so much fraud and, and people that, uh, get, you know, irritated us in our lives and stuff like that. A lot of, it’s pretty obvious. I mean, I probably get dozens of emails a day about, you know, we wanna do this, that, and the other. You know, we want to sign you up as a vendor. Can you send us your banking information Again, remembering what I remember, what my banker told me about giving out banking information. I’m like, eh, no, no, no. Uh, you also have to be careful with your staff. Uh, you know, some of my staff are not sophisticated. As a matter of fact, my IT guy forwarded an email that was sent to him by mistake, uh, saying, Hey, one of your employees wants to change her a CH information, and I replied to him because this guy should know better. He’s an IT, I was like, for number, number one, that’s not her email address, and number two, she wouldn’t send it to that email address. She knows how to reach me. And number three, this is a very, uh, common fraud, and I can’t believe you forwarded this to me. And he is like, oh, yeah, I didn’t really even pay any attention to it. I just saw her name and the subject and, uh, figured it was for you. And I was like, yeah. I said, I get, I get some of these. Some of them routed properly to me. Uh, some of ’em routed to like, you know, general email addresses that also get to me. Um, but, uh, yeah, uh, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve actually had a employee say that, uh, her sister worked for a company that did that. They got an email like that and they responded to, they responded to it and said, yeah, just fill out this new form with your new routing information. And they, they did. And that check, uh, went to the other party and, uh, when she went back to HR and said, Hey, I didn’t get paid. They said, oh, it went to your new account. She’s like, I didn’t give a new account. And they’re like, oh, we got an email from you. She goes, I didn’t send an email. And it, you know, it was, it was hard to believe, but it happened there. Uh, again, she said that they did not get the money back, that once it hit that person’s account it was gone. And, uh, but she got paid, you know, the company made it right and everything like that, but there is fraud that’s out there. And, uh, sometimes it doesn’t even have to be very sophisticated. I, I always wondered how are they getting my employees names and I realize, oh, I have an about section on my website. Good. With each of my employees listed. One thing I’ve learned, if I ever started a new business, the first thing I would do is on my about section, I would never set up my, uh, employee’s real names. I would give everybody a pseudonym. Um, I would even, you know, I do that now with the laptops. Uh, the laptops are just, uh. A color like pr, vanilla or a flavor, I guess pr cherry, pr vanilla, PR grape. And uh, that way when someone leaves, I just change the passwords and say, you’re now PR grape. I don’t have to wipe the whole computer and start from scratch or anything like that. So, but, uh, I do think that, uh, in the future I probably wouldn’t list, uh, their names on there because that’s how, you know, I guess a HR department that happened in this SA case just saw, you know, an email come in about changing the a CH and it was an employee and they’re like, I don’t know if this is that person’s personal email address. I could look it up. But they didn’t bother. They were probably just, you know, in a hurry. And all of that just happened, and, and they were probably cheated on if, you know, a couple thousand dollars. And so it, it is interesting that, uh, sometimes some of the most, uh, least sophisticated stuff is still working.
Yeah, I, we, at my company, we recently got an attempted, uh, scam exactly along those lines where one of my employees got an email from me. You know how like emails you can like, change the, from like, to, to pretend to be from anyone, right? And, or this month’s salary. Please update the banking information here. But my employee was smart to be, to say, to realize it, it made, it made no sense and she, and she asked me about it. But in our case, because of my company, there’s no team page. We realized they had to have gotten any information from LinkedIn. So, so, so, so my, my caution back to you would be, even if you eliminate the team page, you should also eliminate the LinkedIn page, right? As, um, as, as well. And this goes to, I think, a final lesson from that, that wraps all of your stories and insights, uh, together, which is. You need to pay attention to the subtle details. To, to detect these things, so, so for example, people who are unsophisticated about email would see an email from Morgan Friedman morgan@westlake.com, and they would think it was for me. But like, you have to be sophisticated to be like, wait, this doesn’t look right. Oh, you know how Gmail gives you an option to look at the headers? Let’s look at the headers. And it was sent through like some. Dot com NG type. So, okay. Like Morgan’s not sending emails through Nigeria, but, um, but these, these signs aren’t obvious at first. And, um, and I, and I think a good lesson for all the listeners, uh, and a good takeaway is, um, is trust your instinct if some, if, if something smells off. And also to pay attention to, to these subtle little details.
Absolutely.
And with that, we’ll wrap up. Mickey, these were fun stories. Good, uh, good lessons. And I love your glasses. I, I kind of want a pair. I’m just noticing now how it matches with the art behind you. Uh, yeah. And everyone who’s made it this far, thank you for watching and we hope that you’ve enjoyed it and learned as much as we had until next time. ©2026 Client Horror Stories by Beloved by Clients – Privacy Policy, Terms & Conditions – Resources – Beloved by Clients