Con artist. For payment she said she accepted credit card payment. But when it came time to pay she…read moreclaimed her phone was dead and needed to write down my card information. Later that day she ran my card in the amount we had agreed, then later that evening she ran my card again for that amount, then again the next day, then twice again the next day, and over the course of about 10 days ran my card a total of 8 unauthorized times for a total of just under $2000! I'm a teacher, and with Covid and delayed start I was super busy trying to get training completed, new classroom materials put together, etc as well as working another job on top of teaching! So, I needed help keeping the house clean but also I wasn't closely monitoring my bank account and had her come out again to clean! In an empty house unsupervised for 5 hours! She came and cleaned, I was actually happy to have found someone that did laundry which is what we needed most! Then on the following Saturday morning, my bank's fraud department called on some charges they declined that morning for $200, $300, and $500... and then going through recent transactions the con was revealed. My bank wanted me to give her a chance to refund our money. So we did that. Kelly claimed her account was locked and she couldn't log in, though later was showing us screenshots of her logged into her account. Claimed she called customer service, though I had called that same number and they did not take calls on a Saturday. Claimed customer service was doing the refunds for her, though Square told me they never issue refunds on behalf of a merchant. Kelly wasn't able to provide me proof that all the unauthorized charges had been refunded. I then logged into my Square app and found a customer service chat buried in a help menu and they were responding! They were able to confirm that her account was suspended due to fraudulent activity, that she still had access to her dashboard and could issue refunds, and that she had only issued a refund for one payment, the smallest payment that was actually authorized. Why, I have no idea. They told me to do a chargeback at our bank for the others. I relayed this information to Kelly, she was fine with me having to do chargebacks and also filing a police report as part of the process. I printed everything out gave it to the police, all the texts with her, the bank records, the Square records, and the chat with Square customer service. The police told us her name isn't Kelly Cunningham and things she said to them and what she said in texts were typical as something criminals will say and do. We wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt but it looks like we were conned. I'm very sad because I really need someone to help. Now instead I've got my credit card shut off and my credit reports frozen, I'm really hoping she didn't take anything from the house with personal information to do further damage. Later that night I checked the transaction receipts and found all but one unauthorized transaction had been refunded. It's very confusing why not all of them were refunded or why she refunded one of the legitimate charges. Why didn't she just take the biweekly job? Now she has less money than she would have had with taking the job, a police investigation in progress, her Square account suspended... I asked the officer these questions, he said criminals do things that don't make sense to normal people.
