I-Team: Dozens Allege Travel Agent Scam
BOSTON (CBS) -- They'd planned to be on a plane, leaving from Boston and heading overseas. Instead, dozens of customers of one local travel agent never got off the ground.
Lilia Fefelova was one of those clients. She planned to take her son and husband to her native Ukraine to visit her family. She turned to someone she trusted, an acquaintance named Julia Grigoryan, for help booking tickets.
"I know her. She worked with me and everybody knows her," said Fefelova.
But as the trip approached, Grigoryan failed to provide her with airline tickets. There was no refund for Fefelova's $1,800 deposit and Grigoryan wasn't returning her phone calls. It seemed she had disappeared with the money.
This summer the complaints against Grigoryan started rolling in to local police departments. The attorney general's office is now collecting dozens of cases from all over Massachusetts and in California. A large chunk come from Watertown.
Sources tell the I-Team Grigoryan may have scammed more than 50 people out of tens of thousands of dollars. Many of them are members of tight-knit Russian and Armenian communities.
When he learned we were asking questions about the case, Julia Grigoryan's lawyer agreed to sit down with the I-Team for an interview.
"She did not do this for her own financial gain," Dwyer said.
Thomas Dwyer says his client was well meaning but just got in over her head. He claims she wants to make things right.
"Can you confidently say that every person who is scammed out of this money is going to get their money back?" WBZ's Lauren Leamanczyk asked Dwyer.
He answered, "over a period of time, yes," and said "I suspect we'll be working with the attorney general's office to try to make sure that everyone else is paid over a period of time."
But as they wait for a likely indictment, dozens of people like Lilia are still waiting for a check and an apology.
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