When an Ohio U. senior opened the door to his apartment this April and found two men selling magazines, he was skeptical.

“I was about to close the door on them, but one guy asked, ‘Can I use your bathroom?'” David Gold said.

The men said they were selling magazine subscriptions to try earning points to win a trip. The two men also told Gold he could cancel the check and they still would receive points for the sale.

“They got me. I wrote out a check – $120,” he said, adding his roommate also wrote out a $120 check.

Gold immediately called his girlfriend, Laura Miceli, who had been scammed the summer before.

Miceli was home alone when a supposed magazine seller knocked on her door. Although she turned the man down at first, Miceli decided to purchase one magazine subscription after he explained she could cancel the check and he would still receive points in the magazine-selling competition.

“He was very nice,” Miceli said. “I thought he was legit because of the brochures and everything. He wrote me a receipt.”

Miceli bought one, two-year subscription for $80. Later, she found her check had been cashed. Miceli said she never received any magazines.

Because of Miceli’s warning, Gold was able to track down the men quickly and demand his and his roommate’s checks.

“I called them out. I said, ‘You guys are scamming me,'” Gold said. “My roommate went upstairs on his laptop, looked it up and it just said, ‘Scam, scam, scam, scam, scam.'”

The men initially told Gold they could not return the checks and told him there was no one he could call.

“As soon as I tried to get my money, they got really upset with me,” Gold said.

During the exchange, the men told Gold they had visited 16 houses that day. The men had stacks of checks and cash, Gold said.

People are easily scammed because they generally want to do good for other people, Gold and Miceli said.

Following the incident, Gold called the Athens Police Department, and the officer he spoke with informed him they knew about the scam.

However, Lt. Dave Williams said he had not heard about it.

“We have solicitors like that, that pass through now and then,” Williams said. “I don’t know how many are actually legit and how many are scams.”

All solicitors are required to register with city code enforcement and must have a peddler’s permit to sell door-to-door.

People can call code enforcement to check the legitimacy of a solicitor, Theresa Gerren, an administrative assistant for the Athens Code Enforcement Office, said.

Police suggested people call the company the solicitor works for before buying anything and ask that they report any potential scams.

“We’ll take a report, and we will usually try to get ahold of the people if they are still in town,” Williams said. “It is difficult usually to find the people because they move on so quickly.”