THANK YOU, Jack, and to Margie Boule, for getting the word out. And Super Kudos to "the cameraman" as well!

All of you did a fine service by letting others know about the scammer and keeping the info circulating.

It would be nice if this guy could be punished...but hopefully he's at least horrifically embarrassed!

go Jack go....good job!!!!

Way to go, Jack.

Funny that 'theft by deception' apparently is merely a misdemeanor here in Stumptown, but that in other, less "progressive" jurisdictions it's something you can actually be arrested for: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-ODD-Arrested-Three-Times.html?_r=1&oref=slogin ("Around 2:30 that same morning, police say Rich was arrested a third time after taking money from people after telling them he ran out of gas and needed to get to another town. Police say Rich has no car.").

God Bless America, and God Bless Jack Bog!

It's high time someone found a way to put these scam artists off the streets, and Jack, you are da man!!

I'm betting that we won't be seeing Mr. Welches around any time soon, at least not in downtown Portland...

Well done!!

Chief

This guy got me about six years ago on a little side street off Sandy Blvd. I gave him twenty bucks and my address and told him, "Dude, if your scamming me, you're damn good." Then about three years ago, I'm walking by Benson High School and a guy comes up to me and lays that same old bus and taxi to Welches rap on me. I'm thinking to myself, "Damn, why can't a guy this smooth come up with a new story. If he'd wanted to go the Couve I might have fallen for it again."

You know, if you shoplift a single $20 item at Fred Meyer, it's prosecuted. How this is different is beyond me. I'm ready to swear out a complaint, and I'm sure I'd have company.

Alright folks, it's time to make preparations to administer justice. Jack, can you swing a pillowcase full of doorknobs?

If that's a bit much for you, perhaps we can give this guy a mandatory lift out to Welches. Road trip! Come on, it'll be a hoot.

Moderator,
Tried another link with same story. Know the guy's name, but little else...Please email at provided address. I cannot access your tipline - can't figure out Passport.

I wonder how far this vigilantism you've stirred up is going to go. Some of your fans include the Trib crowd, who think that killing is a fitting punishment for anything.

Thanks for that fair and balanced observation.

Congratulations, Jack. Aren't you glad now that you didn't quit blogging?

Ask me again if and when this guy is off Portland's streets.

Why cant we do something about the con-artists at City Hall? Metro and the PDC? This guy is small fish.

This is fantastic. Not only is this guy being stalked and followed by a camera crew but he is wearing the same shirt... everytime... priceless. The way everyone is out to get this guy has restored some of my faith in the public. Thank-you Jack.

I'm surprised that no one else but me has been willing to chip in $10 above and beyond Jack's $50 to make the reward a little more enticing. Regulars in here know that it would never be Jack's style to actually ASK for contributions to the reward fund...so I'm doing it. Come on people, put your money where your mouth is and get a few private investigator types interested in getting a name and address on this jerk! Think about it...you can go without a couple iced mocha lattes at Starbuck's, Stumptown or whatever. They make you fat anyway. O.K. I'm sounding like an OPB pledge drive now, so I'll shut up and let you step up and do Portland proud. Lets get this thing up to $500 or so and generate some heat on this guy. I'd think that the people he ripped off would be especially interested in dealing out a little payback on this chump.

Kevin:

Relax. We now have the man's name, and he may not have a current address. People have been more than willing to come forward. No further reward offers will be necessary.

Been in Welches 10 years...never seen him up here. Apparently his people are in Portland! Don't drag him out here.

By the way...we DO have bus service. It's only $2 to get here on the Mountain Express. Try it sometime!

Jack, I thought I'd never see you do anything cooler than sing "Magic Carpet Ride," but I was very, very wrong. Well done, sir.

You know, I'm preparing to move, and because I'm moving to the land of tiny apartments, I'm getting rid of a lot of stuff. One of the ways I've been doing it is by using Freecycle, which has been a great way to put my used things in the hands of people who can use them. But to make that work and make it feel good, you have to trust people a little bit. You want to trust that they're not just taking your stuff to try to get five bucks for it on Craigslist, you want to trust that the person who tells you she's a young single mom and needs the TV for her daughter really is one, and you want to trust that if somebody tells you she's disabled and works at home and could REALLY use that monitor, it's true.

My point is that you don't want to feel like everybody walking down the freaking street is trying to rip you off. THAT'S why I hate this. It's not just the money, although it's the money, too. It's the way this stuff corrodes people's willingness to trust and aid strangers. And that's what makes it absolute hell if you're an honest person who happens to ACTUALLY lose your wallet or have something else unfortunate befall you.

Thank you, Linda. Coming from you that's a real compliment.

I gave this guy $20 back in Aug, 2002! Same story, he was from Welches. I remember the date because I was involved in a serious industrial accident in July 2002 and I had to go to OSHA offices, downtown Portland. This guy has been doing this for at least 5 years!

Some readers have put it as far back as six or seven years. It's time for this particular cycle to end.

Mayor Bog?

No.

Commissioner Bog? :)

I have never won an election, and I doubt I ever will. Besides, the job doesn't pay nearly enough.

Peat Bog?

This guy has been doing this for at least 7 years. Way back in 2000 / 2001, before getting married and having a kid, I lived in the Pearl District. One day, upon leaving my condo and walking down the street minding my own bidness, a 'flooring contractor' approached me whose truck had been stolen. He needed money to get home after the end of the Max line. He'd pay me back. Being young and naive (I'm old and less naive now) I bit, and actually gave this dude $20. Gave him my card. Did he pay me back?

A couple of months later I caught him doing the same to another couple in a car at an intersection. I stopped and started yelling at him, and actually managed to snap a picture of him (which I am now looking for). He got freaked out and ran. The couple in the car wondered what the hell was going on so I explained; they were relieved. I never saw him again, until tonight on the news. This guy is good, and persistent! He's made a living out of conning the good people of Portland for more than 7 years now. I'm one of the conned, from 7 years ago.


Thank God we now have this "Internet" thingy to keep everyone else from being similarly victimized. But if you ever see this guy at a bar insist he buy you a beer, because as a citizen of Portland ... he owes you one for the rest of us.

Andy - Portland

Would love to see that older photo.

Well, I'll look for that photo for the amusement of all. Unfortunately that was before I "went digital" so the picture is buried somewhere amongst the three large boxes of photos in my basement. I looked briefly to no avail, but will continue to search in the name of the greater good.

Kudos, Jack, big UP. And I got the same feeling -- that you deserve to get something more out of it. Others say bodily harm. You say sequesteration, incarceration.

I say Boule owes you it all; she did her months-ago bit with no bite, only passing along some anecdote she heard, (her old stuff you brought here did not better what you had); in her hands it stayed flat as one gossip column buried beneath all her gross glob of gossip.

You actually were out on the street and proactive. She ought to get around in reality more. You actually put twenty bucks on the line, a dog in the fight. She sips lattes and answers her batphone. Your audience mattered and sorted it out. She writes for hundreds of times more than you, and all together they don't add up to one-hundredth.

Why doesn't the paper ever pick up and carry your other astute on-the-ground observations? Instead, indeed, they go tilting against you as jamming and spamming their flim-flam tram, [shoop do wah]. They rake the big bucks catapulting the poop, and when you serve them a helping on some silver platter, and they fence it and pay you back nothing, bottom line: they owe you more than the mooch does.

I know you don't think it's a media war, but that's fairly well just what you are up to, simply innocently enjoying democratic technology which equalizes the power of the people for all. That unzips the purses of graft and corruption, false power doing fraud pushing fear -- when we talk together, their scam is done, that goose is cooked, whether its the crook con on the street for the last many years, or the crook con in the penthouse the last many decades. Corporatized capitalist Press and injustice meets its match and falls loser to honest and decent commonfolk senses, of caring and sharing and helping each other. Please notice supremacist sicko's are absent among us, those thieves have all run now that lives are at risk, lives lost to the deranged avarice, pillages and rapes, by the Enron, the Bush, the Tram, or the Goldschmidt -- each one at some time protected and pampered and favored and fawned on by hypnotic hype-media which then gets a cut, and cuts out a pound of our flesh of the Earth.

Hypnotic -- hypo-: 'under,' or 'less than;' (g)nosis: 'knowledge,' or 'truth.'

Look at the fewest dots to connect: 3.) Putrefied air, water, soil, global climate desolation, goes red-line lethal from auto exhausts; 2.) automobile sellers buy media ads on TV and in the paper; 1.) TV and paper don't-tell-folks media don't tell folks the planet is poisoned to death, and censor science from broadcasting its sense, and keep secret the massacres, murders, and mayhem, torture made taking from us our small sacrifices in blood, our public treasure in gold -- when we quit our slave work for auto- and oil- and military-industry, then commercial-media fatcats and barons go bankrupt and begging, for a soup bone, and a wine bottle, and a double-sawbuck to get home out in Welches, or wherever the LIARS dream free lunches are, just like all the rest of us here on ground level.

Massmind media never reported to slaves that Clinton said, "Democracy is what comes out the end of the internet." Most likely because democracy goes in it. What that leaves unsaid is the flood that pours out drowns dementia media, fascists and dictators, underground in the bunkers built on the property Satan sold them for their soul.

Margie's column and especially Kyle's TV news story have unleashed a torrent of information about our man. More on that shortly.

But the tipping point was the photo. All kudos go to our reader who did that. You talk about proactive on the street...

"Stolen truck man" must have thought the late night crowd are more naive or don't read the newspaper. He was still out "working" just before midnight.

My brother, his girlfriend and I ran into him and got the story word for word near the Safeway downtown. We told him we had no money and sent him on his way. He was clearly frustrated and told us that he found it hard to believe that nobody downtown had any money. We turned and walked away.

As we walked away, my brother's girlfriend started looking through the paper she was carrying. She had read Margie Boule's column earlier and showed us. It was pretty amazing to see the story he had just said to us quoted in the newspaper.

We saw a police officer shortly after our run in and showed the officer the article and pointed the direction the con man was walking.

Hopefully, he is stopped soon.

As a matter of necessity, from time to time, in addition to computer and radio "intelligence," we keep printed out copies of photos of various known crooks or violent insane people in the cabs.

Or, we try to, anyway. The sheriffs used to bring by their magazine with the "most wanted" photos.

Staring into that con-man's eyes, I start to feel my soul draining away, like when I have to deal with his ilk over and over again downtown.

I'm still cracking up at that signature plea of his :

Have some faith in humanity

Apparently, you underestimated these humans you speak of, parasite. You were on the 6:00 news.

Finally, a photo of 'Dave'. This is the same guy that approached me 5-7 years ago in the PSU area late one night as I left the Waterfront Blues Festival. Amazing that he is using the EXACT same line and continues to get away with it. Don't people listen or read the news. I contacted Marge Boule when she did her column last year and she added my story to the many.

It seems that nobody, other than the victims, feels compelled to try to stop this and at the same time, possibly help the guy. Do we feel sorry for drug addicts/homeless people who take advantage of others or do we just not know how to confront it? A strange societal dynamic if you ask me.

Thanks for the forum to communicate this.

"Another sucker who hasn't trusted anyone as much since he met 'Dave'"

Rule #1 about people asking for money on the street: The longer the story, the more
likely it's a scam.

Dude just tried his schtick on me.
I send punk packing. Aug 09 07.
Downtown Portland, 06:22

Asked him if he learned to be a liar
by growing up watching his mom
hustle Johns in the gutter. No reply.