John Fales was scammed.

He was duped, defrauded and cheated out of $3,500. The 19-year-old KU student is sitting on a substantially overdrawn bank account, and he says it’s because he didn’t check whether something that seemed too good to be true actually was too good to be true.

Fales, a 19-year-old KU student from Fayetteville, N.C., put a television up for sale on hawkchalk.com. A man saw his ad on the online marketplace that makes classified ads available for free to KU students and contacted him about purchasing the TV.

But there was a catch. In a series of e-mails between Fales and this individual, Fales agreed to accept a check for more than the purchase price and then wire the balance to shippers for other products the purchaser said he was buying.

Fales cashed the check at his bank on Feb. 20. He took the approximately $3,500 in cash to Western Union and wired the money to two men in the United Kingdom. When he looked at his bank account’s balance online on Saturday, he was overdrawn by $2,300. The check had bounced – and the bank was holding him liable for the funds.

The e-mails Fales provided are full of what could have been potential warnings. They contain several typos that don’t even seem to be reasonable mistakes, and they all implore Fales to act as quickly as possible.

“The more I reflect on it, the more I wonder, ‘What I was thinking?'” Fales said.

This sort of scam happens all the time, said Joyce Woodard, president of the Better Business Bureau of Northeast Kansas.

“We see thousands of dollars being lost this way,” she said. “We see people losing houses and horses from doing business like this.”

Fales reported his plight to the Lawrence Police Department, as well as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, but he’s one of a number of people who have been victims of similar crimes.

Sgt. Paul Fellers, Lawrence police spokesman, said the department has seen fewer cases like this recently, but some new version of a scam always seems to be making the rounds.

“People who commit these crimes reinvent the wheel all the time and dupe people again,” Fellers said. “If you’re offered more money than the price of what you’re selling, it’s certainly something we discourage doing.”

Fellers said his department tries its best to find resolution in crimes like this, but often its hands are tied.

With the way international check-clearing works, there’s little recourse for a local police department.

“The best thing you can do is educate yourself and exercise extreme caution,” Fellers said.

Adrienne Boyd-Akers, a financial services representative at Douglas County Bank, said her bank has seen plenty of cases like this.

“This is just one type of scam,” she said. “There’s no reason anyone would need to send you a check for more than the amount of purchase.”

Though Fales doesn’t bank at Douglas County, the process a bank goes through when clearing a check is virtually the same anywhere. It can take as long as a couple of weeks for the bank to determine whether a check is genuine, though it generally takes about a week, Boyd-Akers said. Until then, customers don’t have the money from the check.

Boyd-Akers suggested that people employ a heavy dose of skepticism and talk to their bankers if they have any questions about how something works.

“This can be very costly. More and more people are falling victim to those kinds of scams,” she said.

As for Fales, he’s trying to get help from family members to cover the overdraft. His father, who was stationed at Fort Riley, deployed to Iraq two weeks ago. He’s trying to avoid asking his mother for help because he doesn’t want to add to the stress she’s already feeling.

So far, he’s optimistic that other family members will be able to help. Fales already has made one change in his behavior: He won’t be selling anything else online.

“There’s not a chance I’ll ever do that again,” he said.