OWASSO, Okla. — There’s a warning from the Owasso Community Center over scammers targeting their Holiday Craft Fair.
Jean Patterson is getting the Owasso Community Center ready for what she says is its biggest event of the year, their Holiday Craft Fair.
“It’s grown every year it really has so we’re expecting a good crowd this year,” she said.
Jean helps organize the fair and said they’ve put it on for the past five years and have 40 vendors selling lots of handcrafted gifts for Christmas.
But Mariah Brown, who also works at the Owasso Community Center, said people have been trying to scam potential vendors online.
“We’ve had people comment on the Facebook page, reach out to people who are interested as vendors, saying they can get them access to the fair, they can sell them a vendor’s spot, this is not true we’re the only people that are able to do that you’ve got to go through us,” Brown said.
Brown said they try to keep prices down to $25 for a vendor’s booth but scammers have been trying to get people to pay up to $100, as well as asking people to pay online.
“We’ve had comments on our posts, we’ve had people privately messaged, we’ve had people reach out to us asking for clarification, so it seems like there’s multiple methods that are being attempted to get peoples money,” she said.
According to the Owasso Community Center Facebook page, the only valid vendor booth transactions have been through Owasso Community Center staff on site.
Brown said the fair is open to everyone but a lot of the people that visit the center, and some of the vendors, are 60 years old and older.
Brown said its really frustrating to see scammers trying to do this, especially at Christmas.
“It’s really disheartening to see people wanting to scam what are just local businesses owners, local hobbies, to just local community members, that are just wanting to put on a community event for everyone to participate in,” she said.
The people at the Owasso Community Center said they have seen scammers targeting the event before there seems to be an uptick in it this year.
The fair is this Saturday at the Owasso Community Center from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.
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