When you work as event staff, you never know what type of people you are going to have to deal with.

What would you do if you ran into someone pretending to be an employee, but really just scamming attendees?

That is what happened to the worker in this story, and the scammer refused to stop, so he got arrested.

*You* don’t work here dude.

I was helping out during a large festival a few towns over from me, basically just filling in where I was needed.

Uniforms can be very helpful for this type of thing.

Employees came from various places, but we all had on the same neon green staff shirt, so it was easy to find us.

A few people approached me asking why they started charging for parking.

Oh, someone is running a scam.

Weird because they hadn’t and I knew that because I had just been parking people a few hours before hand.

The group told me a guy in a neon shirt told them it was $5, gave them change and everything, handed them a parking tag, and then directed them to another neon shirt.

This may be illegal, depending on where they are.

I grabbed a security guy and we went over to see if we could figure out what was going on.

This guy, I don’t know if I should be mad or impressed, got a neon green shirt and spray painted “staff” on the back.

The scammer really thought this through.

From far away, it looked totally legitimate to the point we glanced around and didn’t notice him.

We approached him originally to ask him if he had seen anyone fishy around.

He knows that this guy isn’t an employee now.

When he looked up, I noticed a small face tattoo. Not that they wouldn’t employ someone with a face tattoo, but I probably would have noticed at the staff meeting we had the day before.

After that we notice his home made shirt and lack of radio or badge.

I’m surprised the guy didn’t just run.

Security guy (S) talked to him (F for fake), later we’ll meet B for boss.

S- Hey bud, you can’t just make a shirt and start charging people to park. If you give the money back and trash the shirt, just get out of here and we won’t call the cops.

He isn’t giving up the scam.

F- Oh no uh John said we ran out of shirts and had me make this one.

S- John who?

F- John uh, you know, big guy, he’s around here somewhere….

If he lies enough, maybe the scammer will get away with it.

Spoiler, there is no John. It’s funny he picked that name because we had 4 Johns the year before, and had made a huge joke out of not having to figure out which John was which since we didnt have a single one.

We also way over ordered staff shirts so we had like 30 left over.

At this point, they should have just called the cops.

S- I know all the staff, there is no John. There are also plenty of staff shirts. One more time. Give the money back, and trash the shirt.

F- Hey man I don’t tell you how to do your job, why tell me how to do mine?

Come on, man, just give it up.

S- This isn’t your job, that’s why. I tried the easy way, it’s on you now.

S calls the cops and we stay by him making sure he doesn’t try to charge anyone else.

This must have been really frustrating.

Made for a few amusing interactions when F tried to tell at passing cars to pay and we immediatly yell over him saying there’s no charge for parking.

Cops come, and Boss.

Ok, the cops can take it from here.

B- Who in their right mind is charging to park? (Sees F) You? Who are you? (Cops walk up) Officers, this man is not on my staff, yet is charging to park in my free lot.

F- Woah hey John calm down! (B gives a weird look like, who’s John?) You can’t just call the cops every time we have a disagreement! If you’re that mad I didn’t order enough shirts just fire me.

I bet the cops were confused.

Me, S, and B almost at the same time “You’re not staff!”

This guy was kind of hilarious. Cops took him aside and he tried so hard to convince them he was staff.

Shouldn’t they just trust the boss who said he wasn’t an employee?

They asked him various questions like how he applied, how much they paid, when we started or ended, and of course he couldn’t answer any of them.

Luckily since he handed out parking tags (printed at home and stuck on cardboard), it was very easy to find how many cars he charged and who.

If he had gotten away with it, he could have made a ton of money.

About 20 cars in the half a hour or so he was there before we came.

Had he just given up when we caught him, he wouldn’t have been arrested.

Wow, the idea for the scam is kind of smart, but he made a mistake by not just giving up once he was caught.

Let’s see what the people in the comments have to say about it.

Yeah, some people work hard at not really working.

Interesting.

Wow, that is an epic run!

They ruined the trust.

LOL, now this would be funny.

What a clever scam.

If you liked that post, check out this story about a customer who insists that their credit card works, and finds out that isn’t the case.