Employees at ColorArt, 101 Workman Road, in Eureka told police that someone fraudulently charged $221,713.78 to the company’s credit card while the business was in the process of taking over an online store it had purchased. Eureka Police are still investigating the incident and will report the information to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, Lt. Michael Werges said.
The fraudulent charges were reported on Dec. 14. ColorArt employees said the company had purchased an online store domain name, and during the ownership transition, they noticed unusual charges from the TikTok social media app, the report said.
The employees discovered a new account had been created under the company’s main TikTok account. No ColorArt employee had access to that new account, which had spent more than $220,000 on ads, according to the report.
The fraudulent account has since been deleted, and as of Dec. 30, the person who created the fake account had not been identified, Werges said.