Hurricane Helen scam: Sanford, North Carolina hurricane victim Rod Ashby scammed out of $40K while trying to find missing wife

SANFORD, North Carolina — Financial setback for Hurricane Helen victim Rhoda Ashby. The scam has robbed him of almost $40,000 as he is still desperately searching for his wife Kim.

Our Raleigh sister station, ABC11, first told you about Rod and Kim Ashby, a Sanford couple who were at their mountain home in western North Carolina when Helen attacked. The Ashbys’ home in Elk Park, near Banner Elk, was swept away by floodwaters with them inside.

The couple held onto each other until they crashed into a tree and were separated. Rod made it to safety; He hasn’t seen Kim since then.

A few days after Helen’s attack, Rhode and the team began searching for Kim, but more than a month after Helen’s attack, the search continues.

“We just want everything to be closed. I mean, no one wants to leave their loved ones on the side of a mountain,” said Rod’s daughter Ansley Ashby.

To achieve this, Rod wants to continue searching for Kim. He lost his truck in Helena when thick mud and water destroyed it.

He currently lives with his family in Pittsboro and wants to buy a new truck so he can continue his search for Kim in the mountains.

“All he wants to do is get back out there and be able to transfer resources to the people doing search and rescue and help as much as he can, but it’s very difficult to navigate the roads without four-wheel drive. car, and we just don’t have another one, so he was just trying to get the truck back so he could go,” Ansley added.

While searching for a new truck, Rod found a 2020 Ford F-350 for $38,900 on a website that claimed to be a Colorado-based auto business that only sold repossessed vehicles.

Ansley said she was skeptical about the deal. However, she spoke with the seller on the phone, received emails about the deal, negotiated a contract and even received an invoice for the sale.

“Everything was confirmed for me. The emails matched, the phone numbers matched, everything seemed legit,” she said.

Rod transferred the money and received a confirmation saying the truck would be shipped within a few days.

“We’re hoping he should have gotten the truck by the 30th, and by then he could have been back in the mountains and that’s when things went south,” Ansley added.

This was a terrible mistake as they noticed the truck was still for sale on the website and quickly realized the deal was a scam. In fact, this site was just a copy of a real car business.

The Ashbys contacted the banks involved, filed a fraud report and tried to stop the wire transfer, but were told it could take up to 90 days to respond, which Ansley said was too long to wait.

“Imagine if it was your wife, your son, someone like you, you want to be there, you want to look, you want to find them, just like everyone else. So I think it was just like another punch in the gut where he said, ‘OK, well, everything went wrong and now it’s set me back even further,'” Ansley said.

Rod filed a police report and said officers were investigating.

ABC11 Troubleshooter Diane Wilson spoke with the owner of a legitimate car dealership in Colorado who was being impersonated by a scammer. He said that over the past few months, he has received so many calls every day from people who thought they were buying a car from him, but in fact it was a scammer. He said the scammer was under-pricing the cars to make them attractive to people so they would let their guard down. He also stated that he was cooperating with law enforcement agencies.

Wilson also tried to contact the scammer, but the website no longer worked, an email to the company was undeliverable, and their phone number was simply busy.

Wilson also contacted the two banks involved in the wire transfer. One responded with the following statement:

“We take the privacy and security of our members’ financial information very seriously. As a result, we may disclose information about specific account matters and procedures only to the member.”

The best advice when buying a car online is to never be too careful. It is very easy for a scammer to duplicate a sales listing and website to make it look legitimate.