Over the last week, a scammer pretending to be from Puget Sound Energy tried to trick people from at least five Coupeville businesses to send money.

In addition, two Coupeville residents fell victim to scams over the last month while Craigslist fraudsters targeted the town in a rental scam.

Coupeville Marshal Chris Garden sent out an alert to businesses to warn them not to fall victim to the scheme. He explained that the corrupt caller seems to know a lot of information about the businesses and sounds pretty convincing.

The caller explained that there was a new meter system and the business needs to pay up front immediately or power will be cut off. At least one of the callers, he said, was directed to go to Walgreen and get a MoneyGram to send right away.

Fortunately, none of the business people fell for the scam. Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case.

Garden said that more than 800 scams of different sorts are reported in Island County in a year. He estimates that only a quarter of them even get reported.

He knows of two cases in Coupeville in the last month in which residents were fooled into sending money. Older people were the victims in both cases, which is often the case.

One of the cases was rather unusual, Garden said. He received a phone call from a man who claimed to be the son of a Coupeville man and was concerned that he was getting ripped off by a scam artist.

The marshal said he spoke to the man, who explained that he received a call from someone belonging to a “secret group” and provided him with a secret code. Another fraudster later called and provided the same secret code, so the man was convinced that the secret group was real.

The man and his wife had sent electronic money transfers to the Jamaica-based swindlers. Garden told them that it was a scam, but they weren’t convinced.

It turned out the couple didn’t have a son.

Garden got another call from the man claiming to be the resident’s son. He confronted the caller, who admitted he was a Jamaican involved in the scam, but said he felt his fellow scammers were taking all the man’s money. He felt bad and wanted to stop them.

“I asked him if he was a scam artist with a conscience,” he said. “I guess he was.”

Garden helped the residents change their phone number. But then an Uber driver showed up at the house, even though the couple had a car; it turned out that the fraudsters had sent the car to bring them to Walmart so they could send the money.

“They can get pretty creative,” he said.

In the other case, a scam artist convinced a woman that she won a $1.5-million lottery in Las Vegas, but she needed to send $2,500 to cover the cost of transporting the money to her. After she sent the money, she got a call from the scammer saying that he was in Seattle and needed another $500 to get to her.

Garden tried to convince the woman that it was a scam, but she was really torn because she didn’t want to chance losing out on the big payout. He doesn’t know if she ended up sending the money.

The scams, he said, are based on one of two different motivations — fear and greed.

“A good rule of thumb,” he said, “is if someone tells you to go to Walgreens, Walmart or any other store and get a MoneyGram, ITunes card or any other such form of non-traceable instant money, it’s a scam.”

Garden also heard about a couple of unsuccessful Craigslist scams recently. The huckster placed ads for Coupeville rental houses and asked for first and last month’s rent up front. The prospective renters showed up to look at the houses and discovered they really weren’t available.

Of course, scams aren’t isolated to Central Whidbey. Pony Mailing &Business Center in Oak Harbor is known for preventing customers from becoming victims. Owner Mike Clewell said he and his workers are sensitive to the clues that someone is being taken advantage of and try to help. “Alarm bells” go off when a person, especially a senior citizen, wants to send a money order overnight to an address that doesn’t seem kosher.

The latest scam, he said, is when a person is asked to send money to help a grandchild get out of jail.

Clewell said they suggest that the customer talk to a family member or to reconsider what’s happening before sending the money.

“If we suspect something’s not right, we ask questions without being too intrusive,” he said. “We’ve caught a few over the years.”