Big Acai Bowls loses all its cash after employees fall prey to Moneypak scam
By Amanda Rooker
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WEST DES MOINES, Iowa (KCCI) — Lanette Byers arrived to her West Des Moines business, Big Acai Bowls, Saturday to find all the money from the cash drawer and safe gone.
A scammer convinced two Big Acai Bowls employees, one in Pella and another at the West Des Moines location, to send them all the store’s cash earnings via Moneypak cards.
“It was a male voice that called and they pretend to be an IRS representative,” Byers explained. “[They tell] whoever answers the phone that the owner of the establishment is in legal trouble with the IRS, that they are under prosecution and investigation and that they have an outstanding fine that must be paid immediately.”
The scammers told the employees to stay on the phone, immediately drive to a grocery store and spend all the store’s cash on Moneypak cards.
“She believed that, in order to save me from arrest, she needed to empty the cash. She let them know how much cash was in the drawer [and] was in the safe. They instructed her to take it all [and] to leave immediately and not tell her coworkers where she was going or what she was doing,” Byers said.
After giving the scammer the ten digit code on the back of the Moneypak cards, the employee was told to destroy each one. The scammer received all the money and left no way for the police or the business to get it back.
“As a human being, you want to be empathetic to the plight of the of the employee [but], as a business owner, you’re wondering what you’re going to do [when] you’ve just had all of your cash turned over to to a thief with no way of collecting it back,” Byers said.
Now she wants others to be aware this can happen to anyone.
“I want everybody to be aware that it’s real,” she said. “They targeted all of our locations on the same day. It’s in Iowa. It’s very real and they are hoping to get somebody very vulnerable on the phone that will comply with what they’re doing.”
“As a business owner, you have to try to ensure that your employees know that under no situation is it okay to take all of the cash out of your business, go to a Hy-Vee, buy Moneypak cards with them and communicate that to somebody over the phone that you have no idea who they are, regardless of who they’re telling you they are,” Byers said.
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