UPDATE: After hearing the woeful tale of the Girl Scouts swindled out of a $24,000 sale, locals in Portland showed up over the weekend to buy up 3,000 boxes of the 6,000 that had been set aside for the hoax order.

KATU News says residents chipped in to help the girls get to camp after hearing their tale of woe. The troop will have another sale this Saturday to try to offload the remaining cookies.

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Times used to be, we hear it’s Girl Scout Cookie season and our hearts were filled with joy while our mouths teemed with saliva. But now, after a rash of mean-people-on-Girl-Scout-Cookie crime? We just hope perpetrators are hit with cookie karma, including whoever it was who tricked two troops into thinking a company wanted to buy $24,000 worth of cookies.

If someone really did want to buy that much in cookies, we wouldn’t have to write this story because that would be a great thing for two troops in Portland, Ore. But instead, as KATU News reports, it was all a cruel joke.

A troop parent claims she was approached by a coworker who asked to set up a large corporate order with a company. The parent says she exchanged a bunch of emails with a person purportedly from that company, who turned out to be a fake when it came time to collect the cash. The coworker reportedly admitted the whole thing was a hoax.

The troops had set aside six thousand boxes of cookies, cookies which would now need to be sold so the girls could raise enough money to go to camp. That’s not going to be easy now that the cookie-selling season is technically over. A lot of the girls don’t have enough cookie credits to attend.

“We have all these younger girls in our other troop. They were all looking forward to going to camp,” said a 12-year-old troop member. “Now with this, we might not be able to go to camp. We really need to be able to sell the cookies.”

We hope next year’s cookie season won’t bring out as many shady, dodgy and otherwise downright mean people because this year has been a doozy.

Order for Girl Scout cookies was a $24,000 hoax [KATU News]

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