For every wonderful advantage of the internet and the information age, there are scams and ways to fall victim to predatory practices. It’s not just individual citizens with unsecured accounts who fall for these scams and crimes. A manager at Auto Zone, the nationwide auto parts chain, paid thousands of dollars to a malicious Bitcoin request from a fake delivery employee. 

An Auto Zone manager cost the auto parts giant thousands after they fell for a Bitcoin scam involving a fake FedEx request

It’s a safe bet that you could hum or sing the Auto Zone jingle if I asked you to do so. After all, if you have a TV, a radio, or watch car content online, there’s a good chance you’ve heard the “Get in the zone, Auto Zone” earworm. Hell, Will Forte played a seemingly endless version on late-night TV. More groundbreaking than the comedic parody, the chain’s thousands of nationwide storefronts are that big of a deal.

It’s no surprise, then, that one of the chain’s managers falling victim to a scam with the company’s cash ends up on public radar. The nationwide chain of maintenance gear and car parts reported that one of its managers received a call from a party pretending to be FedEx.

The faux FedEx employee told the Auto Zone manager that the car parts chain must pay over $2,300 in Bitcoin or they would shut down the account. To make things worse, the manager claims that they received text messages from other Auto Zone managers, per Cleveland.com.

Or so they thought. The combination of circumstances drove the manager to make the payment at a Bitcoin ATM in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time crimes like this have happened to businesses rather than individuals. According to a district manager with the auto parts retailer, similar issues have happened to the company outside of Ohio.