This is too strange not to post. As many of you know, I have several options for buying Matt Wahl CD's. One is by mail order. Basically, you send me a check and I send you a CD. It is probably the least used and 99.9% of the time, when I get a check in the mail for a CD, it is from someone I know personally.

I was hanging out with my brother back in Eau Claire in May. We were using my sister's computer to check our email accounts. I got an email from a fellow named Lee from England. Lee said that he sent me a check on April 27 for $18 for a copy of Endless Summer Sun and he had not received his CD. He had not received his CD for the very simple fact that I never got his check. I was pretty excited that someone from England was trying to buy my CD. I was hoping for some of that David Hasselhoff overseas fame (he's not a big concert draw in the states, but huge in Europe!) So I decided to err on the side of good customer service. I sent him an email, apologized, told him I never received the check but if he emailed back his address, I'd get a CD in the mail to him right away. He emailed back his address, I sent him a CD. I'm a trusting guy. I figured I'd see the check. My brother and I were joking that you'd have to be pretty desperate to be scamming folk singers out of their CD's from half way around the world.

I never got the check.

Today I go to my mailbox and there's a letter from England. I figure it's the check. No. It's a letter from a fellow saying that he sent me a check for $35 for copies of Chasing the Daylight and Open Road back on April 20th and he never got his CD's! Hmmm. It gets weirder. He didn't use his full name, just his first initial (L) and while his last name was different from the first guy, his return address looked kind of familiar. I pulled up my deleted emails and found Lee's address (where I sent Endless Summer Sun) I did some MapQuest searches. The guy today listed his address as 164 Church Street. There is no 164 Church Street in this particular town. The highest it goes is 148 Church Street. And it just so happens that 148 Church Street is less than a mile away from the address Lee gave me to send Endless Summer Sun!

I don't have a big enough ego about my music to believe that there is a mail fraud ring in England whose sole targeted mission is to collect the early recorded works of Matt Wahl. But.... I have never sold any CD's to anyone in England. It would be quite a coincidence that in less than a month, two different people in England, who live less than a mile apart, stumble onto my website, order different CD's, through the mail and I never got either check. I decided to dig deeper.

My first shipment of Sunshine State of Mind was delivered to my home here in Tennessee on May 2nd. I wanted to be sure that if anyone did want to order a copy through the mail, that the checks would come here to TN and not up to WI. So right before the CD's arrived, I changed the mailing address on my website to Louisville, TN. I don't remember exactly when I did this but I would guess that on April 20th and 27th, the dates these gentlemen said they sent their checks, my address might have still been Eau Claire, WI. Maybe not though so that bit of sleuthing is not going to land me on the Scooby Doo gang. But this might:

I pulled up the original email from Lee. I read it carefully and compared it to the letter I got today (it's kind of a slow day here today) Both the email and the letter conclude with this exact sentance, "Please can you let me know what is happening?" An odd phrase, don't you think? Perhaps it's native to that one square mile they both inhabit in England! And think, they would have gotten away with it if it weren't for those meddling kids!

Seriously, if you have ordered a CD through the mail and you haven't received it, it is because I haven't gotten your check. If someone cares enough about my music to send me a check for a CD, I do everything in my power to get the CD(s) in the mail to them that same day. But if I don't get a check I don't know to send out a CD. If this is just a crazy coincidence, please put a stop payment on the check and order the CD(s) with a credit card through the secure, on-line store CDBaby.com.

I didn't know what to do. The nice, mid-western boy in my wanted to send this guy some CD's too. The suspicious part of me called the Postal Inspector and they told me not to communicate with them and to submit a Mail Fraud Complaint! That is probably the wise thing to do. So much for a big European Tour!