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Wedding cake scam uses e-mail to bilk bakeries
BELLINGHAM, Wash. - E-mail orders from out of town come in all the time at Our Kitchen is Your Kitchen, a two-year-old bakery.
So when "Steven Nicole" sent the company an e-mail ordering a $1,500 five-piece wedding cake, to be billed to his credit card, co-owners Miykal Gates and Terri Zweber and staff went to work and got the elaborate cakes ready for pickup. They modeled the cakes after a photo their customer e-mailed to them, complete with silk floral arrays on top.
The customer authorized the bakery to charge his credit card an extra $1,000 for shipping to Canada, and he asked the local bakers to wire the money to his shipper.
Gates said that seemed a bit odd to her. She Googled "Steven Nicole" as a precaution and found no red flags. They went ahead and wired the money. The shipper was supposed to pick up the cake on Saturday.
But Saturday came and went and nobody showed up. On Sunday, Gates said, they got another contact from Nicole asking them to wire additional funds.
Gates said she and her business partner got that sinking feeling. They dug a little deeper. When they Googled "Steven Nicole cake scam," they learned that for at least two years, bakers around the country have been targeted in this way by someone who has been using the same digital cake picture and the same name in some cases.
The address the scammer provided turned out to be a storage unit.
According to some online versions of the fraud, the perpetrator sometimes tells the bakers that wedding cakes are atrociously expensi
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