OCP file photo
By Allison Scarbrough, News Editor
SHELBY — Thanks to good police work by School Resource Officer Tim Simon and detectives Donnie Hansen and Mark Hiddema of the Oceana County Sheriff’s Office, the Shelby public school district avoided being defrauded in a $120,000 money laundering scheme.
The scheme, which involved ordering electronics from Amazon and having them delivered to different locations across the country, was halted by the local officers.
Deputy Simon
“Deputy Simon at the school, working with my detectives, have done a lot of ground work, and they have covered miles and miles — having gone as far as Genesee County — to recover defrauded property,” said Oceana County Sheriff Craig Mast.
“The fraudster who is probably not in our country accessed the purchasing power of the school’s Amazon account and ordered $120,000 worth of electronics.
Det.. Hansen
“My detectives have been able to hunt most of it down, and we are sitting on a boatload of recovered property. It will be able to be returned — the school system is not at a loss. This is another example of how creative these fraudsters can be, and we have every reason to believe that the mastermind of this particular incident was probably in Nigeria.
“The information has been turned over to the FBI’s fraud investigative unit,” said Sheriff Mast.
“We’re really, really fortunate that the school was paying attention and that they contacted Deputy Simon and Deputy Simon worked with the detectives who spent days chasing this down.”
Det. Hiddema
The merchandise was being delivered to “different points around the country,” said Sheriff Mast. “These individuals were being defrauded as well — being told they were going to gain something if they would forward on these packages of stolen property. They’re trying to launder the stolen property. They’re sending it to individuals who then send it on to another location by laundering it and trying to make it untraceable. But we got to it before it got that far.
“It was really good police work and ‘stick-to-it-iveness’ on the part of Tim Simon and detectives Donnie Hansen and Mark Hiddema to follow through and recover this property,” said Mast.
“Last week, Shelby Public Schools worked with the Oceana County Sheriff’s Department to address unauthorized access to the district’s Amazon account following a district user interacting with a phishing email,” said Shelby Public Schools Superintendent Mark Olmstead. “All unauthorized orders that could be canceled were canceled; nearly all shipped items were recovered; and no district funds were impacted.
“In response to this incident, the district worked with Amazon to implement additional safeguards, and the technology department continues to regularly review and work to strengthen security protocols. It is important to note that at no time were district funds compromised. The district’s internal controls, along with the swift response by central office staff and law enforcement, led to a prompt and effective resolution to the situation.
“Each year, we have staff go through an online phishing training to bring to their conscious level that we have to be careful with email,” said the school leader. “With AI, I believe it’s becoming more difficult to decipher what is a phishing email.
“Our tech department and our central office staff did a wonderful job of responding right away.”
Olmstead said he is hoping the local success in stopping the fraud will help on a larger scale. “Hopefully something good comes of it — that we can help shut down some of it. So many people put in a lot of energy to do wrong when it would be so good if they could put it towards doing right.”
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