Complaint Review: RGA Giorgio Armani Reportage - Newport Beach California

At 1:50pm on July 7, 2007, I was exiting the CVS pharmacy at Westcliff-17th Street and Irvine Avenue in Newport Beach, CA, when a white PT cruiser, license plate 5XSZ104, stopped me, driven by two white men, 20's-30's. The driver asked "scusi" which means "Excuse me" in Italian. I know because my parents are from Italy and I was raised bilingual. The driver asked me if I spoke Italian and I told him yes. He started in with the question about the airport, and then started into the story about needing to catch a flight back to Italy, the fashion show story, etc. I stopped him right there because, believe it or not, I had actually already run into these guys (not sure, but probably the same ones) a couple of years ago. One of the freakiest coincidences of my life.

Back then I had politely declined and suspected that this was an isolated incident of panhandling, but seeing this again in front of my eyes, I knew it was a scam. I told him right away that yes, I heard this story before, you've got the Armani clothes and you need to get back to Italy, blah blah blah. I accused them of running a scam and told them I was going to get their plate and call the cops. I did and they drove away. I did call the Newport Beach police.

They told me that someone else had called in about these guys today after a similar incident at a Wells Fargo parking lot, so the dispatcher knew exactly what I was talking about. I

called back a couple of hours later to check and talked to a different police dispatcher. She told me that the plate came back as a rental, and that since there was no crime committed, they couldn't justify getting the driver's info from the rental car company. I was pissed off, but it's true.

Unless any of you victims start filing police reports that you were actually cheated (and acts of charity don't constitute cheating, and they're actually not selling any jackets, just sort of giving them as collateral for a loan), the police can't actually go after these guys. However, if I had engaged and stalled them and been able to call the cops, the cops would have at least questioned/searched them and at least there would be something formal on record. Perhaps the cops would have found them to have fake ID's, or perhaps they would have come up in the computer as wanted for something else, or here in the US illegally.

In retrospect, I wish I'd just played along. Even then, like I said, acts of charity by sympathetic people are voluntary, so there's no crime in that, is there? So they might have been let off. If anyone does finally find out their identity, there's always the IRS. I doubt that they are reporting any of this scam money as income. That's how they put Al Capone away, after all. If you guys are out there, I'm looking for you and know what to do next time.

Communication like this via the internet is allowing us angry, tax-paying, law-abiding, working-real-job citizens to band together. Someday you will land in jail. It really is just a matter of time. All you need to do is scam the relative of someone really important and you're history. I hope you MF'ers enjoy gay prison sex, because that's absolutely in your future!

Aaron

Newport Beach, California

U.S.A.