I was approached in my driveway by a young man claiming to be selling books to help earn himself money for college. He said he was from Florida and his name was Patrick Kennedy. He claimed that he wanted to go to school to become a mechanical engineer and that his parents were broke. I told him to come back later when my girlfriend was home, thinking he wouldn't return. He showed back up about an hour later so my girlfriend & I listened to his sales pitch. He was showing us a pamphlet containing about 15 different books explaining how some were sets & some weren't. He kept pushing the fact that we could donate them to the Los Angeles Childrens Hospital if we wanted to. He displayed the receipts that he would furnish us with if we purchased any books, claiming one was for our taxes & showed us all the contact information on them. We assumed it was a legitimate program & placed an order for a package of five books. While filling out the form with our mailing address he went over the cost for the shipping & explained that another neighbor had given an extra ten dollars so we would only have to pay five of the fifteen dollars he had quoted us for the shipping. He then said that if we didn't want to pay the five dollars he would just take care of it. He had an interesting sense of humor & told us a story about how a girl at a grocery store had gotten him to sign up for greenpeace the other day & that he was now paying fifty dollars a month to that charity. When we asked him how long he would be in this area he quickly explained how he was supposed to be back at the van over an hour ago but because he hadn't met his quota for the day he was still out selling. He also added that his manager would rip him a new one if he didn't meet his quota. We went online & looked up the company Dynasty LLC that he claimed to be working for. There was a website that sold magazines without any sort of contact information available on it. We searched out similar scams on the internet & found other stories like ours. We immediately put a stop payment on our check.
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