NEW PALTZ — The latest scam to hit the Hudson Valley involves duct cleaning. Scammers offering this decidedly unsexy service have been seeking gullible homeowners on online neighborhood forums, especially Facebook.
“As far as I can tell, you call them up, get an estimate, they demand half up front, and they never show up,” said John Bligh, one of a handful of administrators for New Paltz’s community Facebook page. He noticed a bunch of posts coming in from people offering duct cleaning services starting a few months ago. “I hadn’t seen it before, but then people were posting the same thing over and over again.”
The New Paltz page is a fairly large group with over 12,000 members. It’s closed, which means members have to request to join. For the most part, its seven moderators are “pretty liberal” about who they accept. No one has a lot of time to check too closely; this is a volunteer gig, after all. Bligh estimates he spends a few minutes per day reviewing approximately 10 daily requests to join.
“We don’t just let anyone join. A lot of times they will have an obviously fake profile picture of some random model,” he said.
If someone is glaringly not a local or doesn’t even appear to be a real person, Bligh and his co-admins won’t allow them in. “If they are from India or China, they want to join to mine the member list,” he said from experience. The…
