Parking lot dispute ends with Red Lion victimized in elaborate 'phishing' scam: police
Mike Argento- Red Lion Borough, Pennsylvania, was scammed out of over $65,000 through a phishing email scheme.
- The scam involved fraudulent emails sent to the borough, impersonating a legitimate engineering firm and the borough's lawyer.
- The investigation led authorities to Robbie Ann Golston-McNair from Indiana, who is accused of receiving the stolen funds.
How Red Lion Borough got scammed out of more than $65,000 began with parking, the bedrock of our civilization.
A few years back, Red Lion Borough bought and demolished a dilapidated warehouse at 21 W. Broadway and built a public parking lot to cater to patrons of borough merchants. The owners of the adjacent Zarfos Furniture warehouse were upset about it, according to a court filing, hoping to buy what was described as “the blighted property” themselves.
The owner of the building reached out to Red Lion officials and asked to lease a few parking spaces but the borough, for unclear reasons, declined.
Things, according to the court filing, “went south” from there.
An ongoing legal battle ensued. The owner of the warehouse claimed that the parking lot “is pushing on his warehouse and causing structural damage due to the force the heavy parking lot is exerting on the warehouse.” The dispute quickly became complicated with lawyers and engineering firms becoming involved.
It had been going on for some time when, last May 29, Red Lion officials called state police and to report a theft from the borough.
Red Lion, in April 2024, wired $65,827.50 to a bank account purported to be owned by the engineering firm.
The problem was, according to the court filing, the engineering company never received the payment.
Nobody seemed to know where it had gone.
And it began an investigation that allegedly involved Iceland and a 51-year-old home health care worker from Gary, Indiana.
A heist using the internet
The investigation ended with Robbie Ann Golston-McNair, the aforementioned home health care worker from Indiana, being charged with two felonies for participating in what state police described as an elaborate "phishing" scam, in which grifters use email and the mail to con unsuspecting victims.
How a home health care worker from Gary, Indiana, came to be accused of scamming a small town in Pennsylvania out of $65,827.50 is a tale for our age, the age in which the internet has permitted you to have groceries delivered to your door within hours of placing an order and one in which thieves can commit robbery with a few clicks and some light typing.
'Whoever was responsible for this act seemed to have intimate knowledge'
When state police troopers took the original complaint from Red Lion officials, they realized that the nature of the investigation was above their pay grade and passed the information into Trooper Timothy Reynolds, a member of the state police Criminal Investigation Unit who had experience investigating financial crimes.
Red Lion Borough Manager Dan Shaw told the trooper that the borough had an ongoing legal dispute with the owners of the warehouse about whether construction of the parking lot had adversely affected the adjacent building. The two engineering firms came to conflicting conclusions, he told the trooper. The court appointed a neutral firm, Navarro & Wright Consulting Engineers of New Cumberland, to conduct a study at the expense of the borough.
The borough’s lawyer advised officials to direct any communication, and payment, through the law firm to avoid any accusations of conflict of interest, Reynolds wrote in the criminal complaint. A lawyer at the firm, Eric Brown, advised the borough to not make any payments to the engineering firm until he had a chance to review its work.
Not long after that, Reynolds wrote, Shaw received an email from someone purporting to be Brown “to go ahead and pay” the engineering firm.
The borough made the payment, which was never received by the engineering firm, Reynolds wrote in the criminal complaint. Later, Reynolds wrote, the borough did pay the engineering firm what it was owed.
Reynolds concluded that “whoever was responsible for this act seemed to have intimate knowledge of what was going on between Red Lion” and its lawyer and the engineering firm.
Brown told the trooper that he “was very concerned about an IT security issue of data breach involving their systems because the perpetrator used his email signature block in fake emails.”
The trooper spoke with the engineering firm and concluded, “Based on my knowledge and training, and experience, I recognized this incident as an ‘email spoofing scam,’ which is a type of scam involving a fraudulent actor forging or alternating email domains to make them appear as though the emails came from a legitimate and trusted party.”
In this case, the trooper wrote, the emails changed one or two or a few letters in email addresses that were fraudulent to make them appear to be legit.
When investigators checked the email addresses, they found they were registered with a company called Namecheap Inc. with a mailing address in Reykjavik, Iceland. The company offers “privacy service provided by Withheld for Privacy,” Reynolds wrote.
After a series of emails – one of which claimed that the company was no longer able to accept paper checks and had to have money wired to its account – Red Lion Borough made the wire transfer to something called BMO Harris Bank, listing an address on Schuylkill Street in Harrisburg. That address turned out to be a brick rowhouse. The homeowner, when approached by state police, told investigators that she had received some two or three “odd pieces of mail that were addressed to a bank and she wasn’t sure why she was getting that mail,” Reynolds wrote.
The BMO bank account led investigators to Robbie Ann Golston-McNair. The paper trail, according to the criminal complaint, showed that the money from Red Lion wound up in her bank account.
When state police contacted Golston-McNair, Reynolds wrote, she initially agreed to speak to them. Later, he wrote, she declined to speak to police without her lawyer. She didn’t provide her attorney’s name or contact information. After exchanging voicemails, Reynolds wrote he sent her a letter.
“As of 02/25/25,” he wrote, “I have not received any response.”
Golston-McNair has yet to be arraigned, according to court records.
Arrest surprised borough
Red Lion Borough manager Michelle Poole said, "We were as surprised as everyone else that they arrested someone."
She said the borough's insurance covered the loss and that if money is recovered from Wang, it would go toward reimbursing the insurance company. She also said the borough staff's monthly safety meetings now include training on how to spot suspicious emails or other communications.
"It's really sad," she said. "Unfortunately, these days, we're all second-guessing ourselves when we open up our email or check our phones. One letter, one number, one dot being different is all it takes."
Columnist/reporter Mike Argento has been a York Daily Record staffer since 1982. Reach him at mike@ydr.com.
(This story was updated to add new information.)