The principal of a Florida charter school quit her job last week after reportedly writing a $100,000 check to a con artist posing as multibillionaire Elon Musk.
Local NBC News affiliate WESH first reported on Dr. Jan McGee’s resignation from Burns Science and Technology Charter School in Oak Hill, Volusia County, on Thursday.
According to her LinkedIn profile, McGee had worked at the school, which teaches kindergarten through 12th grade, for almost 12 years. The STEM-specializing school is A-rated and has just under 1,000 students.
Announcing her resignation at a meeting with parents and faculty members in the school’s cafeteria last week, McGee said she had been fooled into handing over school funds to a scammer purporting to be Twitter and Tesla CEO Musk.
“I am a very smart lady. Well-educated. I fell for a scam,” McGee said at the meeting, before claiming she had been groomed into handing over the cash.
“Grooming is when you talk to somebody and you believe in them, and they get you to trust them that this is really real, and so I fell for it,” she said.
Parents cheered as McGee told them she would be leaving the school.
McGee had spent four months communicating with the scammer—despite being warned by colleagues the person was a fraud, according to WESH—in an attempt to persuade SpaceX founder Musk to get involved with the school, which is located close to Florida’s Space Coast.
School board chair Albert Amalfitano told WESH last week that McGee ended up writing the Musk impersonator a $100,000 check out of the school’s account, believing she had made the check out to the tech mogul’s right-hand man.
The news channel reported that McGee had authorization to write checks of up to $50,000—anything over that amount required approval from the school board. The school’s business manager reportedly stopped her check before it cleared.
According to Amalfitano, the Musk imitator had promised McGee millions of dollars in funding.
“Somehow she believed it,” WESH quoted him as saying. “He must have been really convincing.”
A spokesperson for Burns SciTech was not immediately available for comment when contacted by Fortune.
Elon Musk scams
McGee apologized to the school board and the wider community, but some of her coworkers used the meeting to depict a toxic working environment with her at the helm. Three administrators reportedly said they would prefer to quit than continue working for McGee, cementing her resignation.
The Burns SciTech school board has reportedly pledged to hire a third-party investigator to conduct a probe into how the scammer was almost handed thousands in school funds.
McGee’s self-described “mess” isn’t the first to arise from Elon Musk–based scams.
In 2021, cryptocurrency scammers pretending to be the Tesla boss were said by U.S. authorities to have made more than $2 million in just six months.
A year earlier, Musk, alongside billionaire tech founders Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, had their Twitter accounts hacked in a Bitcoin giveaway scam.
Earlier this year, Forbes detailed 25 scams driven by Elon Musk impersonators, which have seen people targeted via social media and swindled out of a plethora of assets.
