My brain has been through a lot these last couple weeks (more on that sometime down the road I’m sure), but I still have no idea why this particular scam worked. Maybe you can pull it once because there’s someone out there that’ll fall for anything, but multiple times? Nothing about it makes any sense.
According to investigators, between October 2024 and August 2025, a man posing as a babysitter named “Ashley Turnbull” was hired for a number of babysitting jobs. They did not disclose how many jobs he was hired for.
Police allege the man would send cheques to the victims and ask them to deposit the funds into their accounts. He would then request that they transfer the money from the cheque back to the accused, so the funds could be used for supplies and material needed to babysit.“When the cheques were deposited into the victims’ accounts and transferred, often days later, they learned the cheques were fraudulent,” police said in a news release issued Wednesday.
The money was never recovered, police said.
Forget babysitting, which I’ve done without requiring such a convoluted process or even much of a process at all, but this just is not how literally anything ever works. The tiniest bit of thought and the whole thing falls apart.
If supplies are needed, you buy them and then figure it into what you charge the customer when the job is done, or the customer provides them and you do the job. Those are your choices. No matter which one you choose, if everyone is on the level, then someone is using his own money from one of his own accounts to accomplish the goal. This would, assuming that common sense is our guide, mean that if you have cheques to deposit, you would go ahead and deposit those on your own. You would definitely not go to the trouble of writing a cheque to your customer, because that makes no sense. You have the money, go buy the stuff. No need for the weird extra steps that do nothing but inconvenience everyone involved. And if you did for some reason want to write a cheque to your customer, then why in the world would your customer ever agree to cash it and send the money back to you unless your customer is a dunderhead, because that’s sketchy as all hell if you bother to use five seconds of thinking power. You can’t even blame desperation on the client side here, because if you have time to wait for a cheque to come to your door, you have time to find a babysitter that isn’t a straight up crook.
I do hope that this Kim Manget fellow does some time and is forced to make restitution to the people he defrauded assuming he’s guilty, but I won’t lie. I don’t think it would hurt my feelings much if none of those people ever saw a dime. I know we aren’t supposed to blame victims, but now and then there are people who need a good victimizing so that they can perhaps make up for the practical critical thinking skills they clearly missed out on as children when the rest of us learned them.