KGVY Radio, Monday, April 21, 2008

Green Valley Sheriff’s Auxiliary Volunteers

Bill Roskey

This past week, SAV received reports of two separate cases of bicycle theft. One bike was valued at $200 and taken from a resident’s back yard; the other was valued at $350 and was taken from a carport. We ask folks to be careful with their bicycles. Living in a good neighborhood that’s largely crime free doesn’t mean you should let down your guard completely. Many crimes are unplanned. They’re “crimes of opportunity,” meaning that a person will just cruise around looking for something that appears to be valuable and unguarded. In Green Valley, we’ve had a number of cases where items like sets of golf clubs are stolen from a garage. Even though it may be broad daylight, and the open garage door a pretty good indication that someone is in the house, if no one seems to be looking at the time, the clubs or bikes or whatever can be gone in a flash.

This past week, SAV also received the types of reports of fraud that have become all too familiar. For example, one local bank manager received a telephone call from a man purporting to be a client, saying he wanted to remove the hold on his account. Fortunately, the manager knew the client and therefore knew that the caller was not him. In another case, someone stole checks from another resident’s mailbox, made three of them out, and cashed them. The total amount of the three checks was over a thousand dollars. In still a third fraud, someone changed a check written by another resident by adding a “1” before “50,” making it three times the amount the resident had written. By and large, the residents have become a lot more wary about some of the kinds of fraud that criminals have been committing these days, particularly phony sweepstakes, identity theft, and credit card fraud, but the bad guys are still out there, so remember to be careful with all your financial transactions and your financial information.