Turning a Scam into Service

A cruel holiday scam becomes a feast for families in need, thanks to Chef Isa and FWK donors

When the catering inquiry came in, it looked just like the hundreds of other jobs we’ve done. In this case, a customer was hosting a special family reunion over the Thanksgiving weekend, and  wanted a Mexican meal for 150 people, delivered to a specific local venue address on Black Friday. The customer even requested Chef Isa by name in the emails back and forth, so we assumed they had enjoyed Isa’s food in the restaurant or at a market event recently. The emails asked Isa for all the details: multiple courses and dessert. The family had set aside a big budget for this meal, so make it special, the emails said. Feast sometimes uses contracts and prepaid deposits for large catering jobs, unless we personally know the customer or solidly verify things, in which case we will simply accept an invoice payment in full on the day of the event. The customer used a name that corresponded with the Facebook account of a real Spokane-based woman, and everything seemed very normal via both email and text. This was our mistake.

On the day of the event – after working late into the night on Thanksgiving Day prepping everything from scratch, and cooking all day on Friday – Chef Isa showed up to an empty venue. There was no 150-person family reunion excitedly waiting for a Mexican feast. There was only a dark, vacant building and a van full of piping hot food and Isa’s signature desserts. Responding to Isa via text, the “customer” said her husband was in an accident that morning, and that she was at the hospital with him, so the party had been postponed. In the stress of everything, she had forgotten to reach out to Isa. They made arrangements to have someone pick up the food (and pay) later that day at Feast World Kitchen, which was closed for the day. Discouraged and tired, but respectful of a family going through a crisis, Isa agreed. So she went to Feast, transferred the food into warming units, and waited. And waited. And waited more. Finally late in the evening the texter said they are sorry but they can’t pick up the food until the following day, so Isa cooled the food and went home. What a long and crazy day!

Early the next morning, the texter reported that – great news – her husband would be okay and wouldn’t need surgery. And also they said they could pay the invoice right away, but only via a specific app. And then they began asking if they could overpay the invoice by several hundred dollars, and credit the overpayment back to the family reunion “event planner” because this would be the easiest way for the customer to pay their event planner. 

That’s when we (Ross, Maisa, and Isa) started piecing things together. After all of the detailed planning and bizarre circumstances, this was simply a “refund scam” – a scheme where someone tries to use a stolen credit card to pay a refundable deposit or overpay an invoice, and then requests for the refund amount to be sent elsewhere, rather than being credited back onto the card that was used for payment. Basically, it’s a way people try to get cash out of stolen credit cards, using vendors like caterers as their ATM machine. Our research revealed that sometimes, in the cruelest version of the refund scam, the scammer tries to put the vendor in a situation of extreme stress so they will make a quick decision, complying with an unusual request just to get paid and be done with the whole scenario. In this case, the scenario of extreme stress was Isa and her family doing a ton of work to prepare and deliver a 150-person meal for nobody.

We immediately reported the incident to law enforcement, and when we didn’t agree to accept payment and then refund part of it back to a different account, the texter became non-responsive. Our suspicions were confirmed.

We were devastated. But of course, we didn’t want anyone using a stolen credit card to pay us. Now we had another issue to deal with: what to do with the 150-person meal being held in fridges, and what to do to help make things right for Isa and her family financially.

Isa immediately began reaching out to contacts, and she got in contact with Family Promise, which does incredible work in Spokane helping families and communities end the cycle of homelessness. They said they would love to end the Thanksgiving weekend with a wonderful Mexican meal for everyone at their shelter. So, the next day, Isa and her family reheated and safely delivered the meal to Family Promise. This time, they didn’t find a dark, empty building, but they were greeted joyfully by a big, hungry crowd! This is what Chef Isa wrote, reflecting on the experience serving the meal.

We are blessed to have had the pleasure of turning an unfortunate event into the ability to bless those in our community with a meal. It was a very endearing moment and life-changing experience to see the gratitude and appreciation of the staff, the people staying at Family Promise, and their guests.  One woman was so grateful for the meal; she mentioned she’d been planning to share the last of her corn dogs with her kids. There were many “thank you’s” as they heard they’d be getting desert as well! We felt beyond blessed to have the opportunity to give them a special belated Thanksgiving meal. We’d like to thank Feast World Kitchen for helping us give back to our community. I will always remember this Thanksgiving weekend.

As for absorbing the financial loss, this was a community effort as well. Isa’s small catering company certainly didn’t get the massive payday they were working for (150 people at $30 per person is what the fake customer arranged). But Feast World Kitchen has a special bit of money called our “Community Meal Fund,” which was started by one of our most faithful volunteers and donors around Thanksgiving a few years ago. The fund is truly a “win-win” – it helps us avoid waste, helps our chef families avoid financial loss, and it helps local charities in our city have access to gourmet international food. Once in a while, one of our independent chef partner families cooks far more food than they can sell (sometimes an unexpected weather event makes the restaurant very slow, or a misunderstanding or miscalculation leads to a lot of extra food). In these cases, Feast uses the Community Meal Fund to pay the chef a fair rate for their extra food, and then safely distributes the food to a local shelter like Cup of Cool Water, the City Gate, or in this case Family Promise. We love that Community Meal Fund donors help turn a bad day into a good day, for those who cooked the food and for those who eat it!

Because of the Community Meal Fund, Feast was able to pay for the ingredients and time Isa and her family had put into the fake catering job. It wasn’t the full invoice amount, but it was a fair rate, and it took the sting out of this terrible experience, ensuring that this scammer wouldn’t create a big dent in their small business’s bank account. The fund – made possible by FWK donors – saved the day on a scale it never had before!

We learned a lot from this bizarre incident. Feast will certainly be more careful moving forward, and we’ll also be teaching and encouraging our network of microbusiness owners to be on the lookout for scams like this. At the end of a stressful Thanksgiving weekend, we were all thankful for some redemption. 

As much as the money helped Chef Isa recover from a distressing incident, she is clear that the deeper “payment” came from the smiles and words of gratitude at Family Promise, and from the simple joy of providing an unexpected feast.

If you’d like to specifically designate a gift to Feast’s “Community Meal Fund” you can select this option within our current year-end campaign.