I Won't Get Fooled Again.

“If something seems too good to be true then it probably is.”

However, sometimes you just can’t help yourself and I can recall one afternoon when I fell for one of the biggest scams around.

Movenpick restaurants were a chain of higher end Swiss owned eateries throughout the city of Toronto. My employer Beatrice Foods had secured a multi-year contract supplying each location with all their dairy products including ice cream. When I say ice cream, it was not our usual Beatrice ice cream. The ice cream was specifically made to Movenpick’s secret Swiss recipe and many of the ingredients were imported directly from Switzerland with absolutely no exceptions or substitutes. Needless to say the ice cream was very expensive to make and even more expensive to buy.

Personally, I never could understand the fascination with the very pricey and overrated Movenpick restaurants. Although, I will say that the apple strudel with a scoop of vanilla bean ice cream was pretty amazing.

Since my route was within the downtown area of Toronto, I serviced all the Movenpick’s with ice cream. The busiest location by far was the Yorkville restaurant right beside the Four Seasons Hotel. During the summer months I would make a minimum three deliveries every week and each delivery was a very time consuming process. If I was lucky I would get a parking spot on the street close to the restaurant and I would be able to finish my twenty plus 100 litre cart load trips to the kitchen’s back door in an hour. However, on most days I was unlucky and the deliveries would take me much longer.

Trust me, I did not miss the day when after ten years Beatrice Foods would end up losing the Movenpick contract.

One summer afternoon I was slugging ice cream out of my truck when I was approached by a guy on Yorkville Avenue asking me if I could help him out. For me while working downtown not a day passed by without me being asked if I could help someone out. It was a daily occurrence and for the most part I either ignored them or I simply told them to get lost.

Downtown Toronto like all big cities has its fair share of street people. There are drug addicts, alcoholics, hookers, homeless people and just plain lazy bums roaming the streets all day every day. Not surprisingly it was more profitable for them to simply beg for money than it was to be employed in a minimum wage job.

The guy who approached me that afternoon looked different. He looked like he could have been on his lunch hour from one of the many higher end retail outlets at the nearby Hazelton Lanes. He showed me a men’s diamond ring in his hand and said he needed a couple hundred dollars for his rent or he would be evicted. Right away I assumed the ring had been stolen as he handed it to me to look over. I remember the ring feeling solid with the weight of a small rock and I could clearly see 18k was stamped on the inside of the band.

“Is it stolen?” I asked.

“No, I don’t want it anymore and I know I can sell it for my rent money.” He replied.

I by no means was a jeweler, but I knew the ring I was now holding was worth a lot more than the two hundred bucks he was asking.

That should have been my first clue that I was being scammed.

“I’ll give you two hundred bucks,” I said as I peeled off the money from the company funds I always had in my pocket.

I handed him the money and he immediately quickly disappeared onto the crowded street.

That should have been my first clue that I had just been scammed.

I was nervous and I remember thinking the ring was indeed probably stolen. Perhaps it had been stolen from a nearby jewelry store. The cops were sure to be swarming the area very soon and I could be in big trouble for being in possession of stolen property. I tucked the ring into my sock and I continued on with dropping off cartloads of ice cream to the kitchen door.

After my delivery I drove to my next stop with the ring still in my sock. Once I had stopped I examined the ring very thoroughly. There was no doubt I was now in possession of a men’s 18k gold diamond solitaire ring worth at least two grand I thought to myself. I put the ring into my pocket and continued on with my day. When I arrived home that evening I remember Bonnie also thinking the ring was probably stolen. She also agreed the ring was worth at least ten times the two hundred bucks that I had paid for it. It would now be an investment; I put the ring in a lockbox that night and forgot all about it.

A couple years passed and for whatever reason I had retrieved the ring from the box. Everything about the ring looked exactly like it did the day when I bought it. I no longer was a ring wearer and I had my wedding band in the lockbox as well. There was also a small men’s diamond cluster ring I bought and wore the day Bonnie told me she was pregnant with our first child and that too ended up in the lockbox. Wearing a ring let alone multiple rings I felt was unsafe on my job. I stopped wearing rings altogether when a guy who was a receiver at a store on my route lost a finger. His wedding ring got caught on a freight elevator door while the elevator was moving.

From then on I never wore my wedding ring or any rings ever again.

It was around this time that I was very interested in purchasing some higher end investment hockey cards. I assumed that if I sold my big honkin' diamond solitaire ring, I would surely have enough cash to buy the cards that I wanted. But first I needed to find out the value of the ring.

Still assuming the ring could be stolen I did not want to have it appraised at any jewelry stores. There was a guy who lived in my neighborhood and did jewelry appraisals in his house. The following day I was walking my daughter Stephanie home from school; I knocked on his door and made an appointment. I showed up at our agreed time. I simply told him that someone owed me a couple thousand bucks and that they wanted to give me a diamond ring as payment. We walked down into his basement where he sat at a desk with all these very cool looking instruments. I had no idea what any of them were.

I handed him the ring, he smiled.

“The ring is worthless.” He said as he handed the ring back to me.

“Seriously, the guy told me he had paid a couple grand for it,” I told him.

“He got ripped off, I see it all the time. Those rings are massed produced in China for less than ten bucks each” He added.

He was not even going to charge me his usual thirty dollar cash fee for appraising a ring. I insisted that I give him his fee and he give me a genuine certificate stating the actual value of the ring like he normally would for any genuine ring. I left his house that afternoon with my big honkin' brass, cubic zirconia, solitaire ring with a generously appraised value of $75 in my hand.

I felt like such an idiot, I had been scammed. There would be no Wayne Gretzky or Bobby Orr rookie cards for me at this time. Instead of throwing the ring in the garbage, I put the ring and the certificate in the glove box of my truck the next day. I figured if anything it would be a good $230 reminder the next time I was tempted to fall for another too good to be true street scam.

A costly reminder so that I won't get fooled again.

Fast forward a couple years and I am making a delivery at a supermarket in the Junction area of Toronto. I had just gotten out of my truck when scammer #2 came out of nowhere. He startled me as he came up from behind my truck.

“Hey man, ya wanna buy a diamond ring?” were the first words out of his mouth.

Unlike the Yorkville scammer, scammer #2 looked like a junkie needing money for his next high.

He opened up his dirty hand to show me the ring. It was the exact same fuck’n ring I had bought from the Yorkville scammer years earlier. It was the exact same fuck’n ring I had sitting not even ten feet away in my glove box.

Seriously, I can’t make this shit up.

“Nice,” I said

“How much do you want for it?” I asked.

‘Gimme a hundred bucks and it’s yours.” He replied.

Seriously?

It must have been the neighborhood because the same ring was being sold in ritzy Yorkville a couple years earlier for two hundred bucks.

I would know because I bought one.

I still had his ring in my hand.

“Sounds good, I’ll give you a hundred bucks for it.” I said as I climbed back into the truck reaching over to open the glove box. I grabbed the first ring and I proceeded to show him how I had already been scammed once already on the exact same ring. He knew I was angry. I threatened I was going to punch him in the face, but before I could he was already fleeing the scene. He ran through the parking lot like a gazelle as he disappeared down a side street.

I never saw scammer #2 again.

I now had two identical rings sitting in my hand. I threw them both back in my glove box and went into the store to make my delivery.

Weeks later I was telling this story to a work colleague; I went out to my truck to retrieve the two fake diamond rings from my glovebox to show him. They were gone, the certificate was still there but both rings were missing. I had been scammed once again; someone had stolen my two worthless rings right out of my truck. It would not surprise me if it was scammer #2 who had stolen them.

Afterall, he knew I drove a Beatrice truck and I was always in the area. He had seen me lean over and retrieve scammer #1’s ring from my glovebox when he tried to sell me his ring. Perhaps he just waited until I went into a store one day to make a delivery; I never locked my doors or the glovebox. He could have easily taken them in mere seconds and simply walked away. Technically one of those rings still belonged to scammer #2, so in reality he was just taking back his own property. He knew the rings were worthless garbage so he took them both.

No harm, no foul.

There’s no doubt in my mind both of those rings ended up back on the street. I am sure some other poor sucker fell for the exact same scam like I did back in Yorkville many years earlier. Afterall, there’s a sucker born every minute, a sucker who just can’t help himself.

I would know because I was one of them.