COVINGTON, Ky. —

Angel Williams has been looking for housing for months. The end of her lease was quickly approaching, and she said she wants to move closer to her job in Florence to cut down on the money she is spending on gas.

Now she is out of more than $1,500 and has no home to show for it after she was scammed.

Covington police are now investigating.

A few days ago, Williams thought her dream home was within reach. She took her three kids to see the home, after she toured it on her own.

"I'm about to get this dream home that I always wanted for me and my kids," she said. "We prayed over it and everything. Me and my mom prayed over it and it was just like this is just meant to be. This is a new beginning for me."

"Walk in your walk-in closet. Feel like a queen," one of Williams children said during the tour.

Williams said the children fell in love. The family took several videos inside what they believed was going to be their new home.

"Everything seemed legit," Williams said. "I get there, they give me the lock code number, I get the key, I go in."

She had been communicating via text, email and phone calls with the man posing as the landlord. Twice, she said he gave her an access code to go inside the home. She said the codes were different each time.

Williams found the man's contact information through a listing for the four-bedroom Covington home on Craigslist.

She asked the man if he accepted Section 8 vouchers, which is housing assistance from the federal government. The man said he did. He also sent her a renter's application and year-long lease agreement. She signed both.

"He was like, 'I want you to get to know me a little bit better before you get the property, get to know the property a little bit better.' And I'm like, 'OK' and I'm doing that. And it's just like everything just seemed legit. I get the application. It has the equal opportunity property on there and everything," she said.

The man told Williams he was a truck driver, processes payments on the road and only accepts a specific kind of prepaid gift card as payment.

Williams purchased $1,700 worth of gift cards Monday and sent photos of them, along with the receipt. The money was supposed to cover $1,300 for a security deposit and $400 for first month's rent.

"An hour goes by and I'm like alright I'm waiting for the keys. Texted him, texted him, called him, couldn't get through," she said. "When it got about 5 o'clock and he didn't text me back or call me back about the keys, I knew something was wrong. I felt it in my stomach."

Williams had no receipt, no keys and no home. The person she had been contacting went silent.

"I tried not to cry in front of my daughter but I'm like 'daughter, I feel like we got scammed. I feel like this man just took all of our money,'" she said. "Please Lord, this is not true. This man didn't just take everything from me. So I tried calling again and he didn't answer."

According to the Kenton County property valuation administrator, the home is owned by AH4R Properties Two LLC. American Homes 4 Rent is legitimately renting the home for $1,950 dollars a month. WLWT reached out to the company alerting them of the scam and asking who has access to the property. The company has not yet responded.

Tuesday evening there was a fraud alert sticker on the door of the home.

WLWT is not reporting the name of the scammer, because we cannot confirm the person is who they claim to be.

When reached by phone Tuesday night, the man, whose number is posted on the Craigslist ad, said the Covington home is still available for rent.

WLWT asked the man whose number is posted on the Craigslist ad if he is also renting out a home in Florence. The man said he is renting out the Covington home and the Florence home. WLWT has confirmed neither property are his to rent.

When WLWT Investigative Reporter Jatara McGee started asking the man about the $1,700 Williams sent him, he denied it at first and then hung up.

Police recommend a few tips for avoiding similar scams: do not use prepaid gift cards for payment. Do not use websites like Craigslist that anyone can post to for housing. Utilize reputable websites.

Google also has a feature that can help. Right click an image, for example, an image of a home on a listing, and select the option to search the image with Google lens. The feature will run a search to see if the photo is listed on other websites. If you notice another website has a different landlord or seller listed, that is a red flag.

BALTIMORE — Restaurants are the backbones of communities across the country. They bring us to the freshest bodies of water, different countries, and the most unique spaces without leaving the comfort of our neighborhoods. Three years after the start of the pandemic, restaurants are still fighting to stay alive.

A year ago, we visited Baltimore to check in on restaurants that never received their funds from the government's Restaurant Revitalization Fund, and now, a year later, we are checking in.

Every restaurant has something different their customers always come back for. Here in Baltimore, it's likely you'll find it to be seafood. However, those signature flavors disappear if a business can't stay afloat. The Local Oyster is one restaurant that worries about its future.

"The Local Oyster started in 2015. We have been shucking oysters and serving crab cakes for the last seven years," said Patrick Hudson, one of the owners. "We were not generating any revenue; we were simply incurring losses and debt throughout the entire pandemic."

The Local Oyster has already had to close one of its locations in Arlington, Virginia. The restaurant's last spot remains standing, but shakily.

"Thinking about business before COVID is sort of like thinking about college; it was just a haze. It's like I can't even really remember what it was like. It's just so different," Hudson said.

Hudson says they are one of the thousands of businesses who saw their approval for the restaurant revitalization fund revoked last year. Congress provided $28.6 billion in grants, but funding dried up and two-thirds of the restaurants that were approved for funding received nothing.

"What that does is it leaves the local oyster in a position where we have hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt going forward, and to be honest, I don't know how sustainable that is. I don't know if that's going to last," Hudson said.

It's been over a year since that bad news was delivered, but the ripple effects of the pandemic continue to affect them every minute, of every day.

"And it's kind of surreal and people will come up to me during service and say, 'Well, I'm really glad you survived the pandemic' and I just have to shake my head," Hudson said. "We're gonna be struggling with the impact of the pandemic for the next generation of restaurant owners."

Damye Hahn runs Faidley's Seafood just a few minutes down the road.

"It would be like equating you to having a year and a half worth of mortgage payments that you haven't been able to pay, and all of a sudden, you get a job. Well that you're gonna be able to pay your mortgage, but that year and a half of mortgage payments is still hanging out there," Hahn said. "We just felt like the hits just kept coming and once we thought everything was beginning to get better than this incredible inflation hit. And it has been difficult again."

They've been in business for more than 130 years. Yet, these last few have been unmatched.

"We've had to raise prices. We've had to cut items off the menu that we can't carry anymore because they are just too expensive," Hahn said. "Fishing, it's been terrible to try to get fish because the poor guys, all their boats are diesel, and the diesel is outrageous. Fish and seafood have gone up dramatically. Some of it two and three times what we paid in 2019."

These are the kinds of roadblocks that can change a restaurant's identity.

"We consider ourselves really ambassadors of the Chesapeake region, so we make sure that we gave local fish, local crab, local oysters, real local seafood," Hahn said.

It worries Hahn about the future of the industry.

"This industry is so important because we tell the story of the Chesapeake, but there's restaurants that tell stories of the farms and other industries," Hahn said.

With every new college semester, students are faced with multiple syllabuses outlining the subjects in their classes.

But do students read them thoroughly? One Tennessee professor put it to the test.

Related video above: Freshman year tips to set you up for college success

Kenyon Wilson is the associate head of performing arts at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and decided to put an Easter egg in the syllabus for his music seminar class this past semester.

The hint read: "Thus (free to the first who claims; locker one hundred forty-seven; combination fifteen, twenty-five, thirty-five), students may be ineligible to make up classes and ..."

This would have led students to a locker that contained a $50 bill, free to the first student to claim it.

But at the end of the semester, when he went to check the locker, the bill was still there.

"It an academic trope that no one reads the syllabus," Wilson told CNN. "It's analogous to the terms and conditions when you're installing software, everyone clicks that they've read it when no one ever does."

The class was made up of 71 students. Wilson told CNN that his syllabus typically doesn't change much, but with COVID protocols there was some new information this time around.

"There's a standard boilerplate that doesn't change. The university has us put a lot of legal stuff towards the end," Wilson added. "But on the first day of class I told them there was stuff that had changed, and for them to make sure they read it."

When Wilson put the reward in the locker, he left a note inside that read "Congrats! Please leave your name and date so I know who found it." He was also sure to set the combination lock with a certain number in the noon position, to determine whether any students had tampered with the lock, but the combination was never even turned.

"I had great hopes, and I'd be just as happy having this conversation if one of my students found it on the first week," Wilson told CNN.

Wilson waited until final exams were done and the semester was over before checking the locker.

He revealed the unclaimed cash in a post on Facebook. He tells CNN that students have been "good sports" about it.

Haley Decker, a recent graduate from the university, took Wilson's seminar-style class for the past 3 and a half years and was one of the students who failed to find the hidden cash this past semester.

"I honestly thought it was hilarious," Decker told CNN. "This class typically is the same format every semester, so students know what to expect and don't take the time to read the syllabus like we should."

Decker said she texted a group of friends that were in the class with her and everyone thought it was a clever move by Wilson. "I think this was a really smart experiment for Dr. Wilson to test out," Decker said. "It definitely made the music students realize that despite repetitive information you should still read through your syllabus carefully."

The professor notes that it was all in good fun.

"I know my students read, and I don't expect them to religiously go through word-by-word but if they did, I wanted to reward them," Wilson told CNN.

"Everyone was guilty of having absolutely no idea it was in there," Decker said. "We all admitted we briefly skimmed that part of the syllabus because that policy is in every syllabus for every class you take."

Wilson's Facebook post not only sparked a reaction from students but gave other professors and teachers around the nation an idea. "Perhaps spring 2022 will be the most well-read syllabi ever," Wilson noted.

A former boyfriend of a woman who says she was paid to give sexual favors to Jeffrey Epstein, starting at age 14, corroborated parts of her account Wednesday at the sex trafficking trial of the millionaire's longtime companion, Ghislaine Maxwell.

The man, identified only as Shawn to protect the identity of his ex-girlfriend, said on multiple occasions in the early 2000s he drove three girls he knew to Epstein’s estate in Palm Beach, Florida.

He would wait in the car for an hour until the teenagers would emerge with $100 bills.

The girls included a woman who testified on Tuesday only as Carolyn to protect her privacy. She had told the jury she made hundreds of dollars giving sexualized massages to Epstein, and that Maxwell had fondled her and told her she “had a great body."

Shawn said he and Carolyn used some of the cash to support their drug habit.

The testimony came as the government neared the end of its case against Maxwell, who has denied charges she instructed teenagers to give Epstein sexual messages at the millionaire’s residences in Florida, New York and elsewhere.

Maxwell's lawyers have said she's being made a scapegoat for sex crimes committed by Epstein, who briefly went to jail in a child prostitution case in 2008, and then killed himself after he was hit with new charges in 2019.

The last of four key accusers was expected to testify Thursday before the government rests its case. The defense is set to start its case next week.

In his testimony Wednesday, Shawn said he drove the girls to Epstein's posh property from the much less affluent neighborhoods of West Palm Beach, where the teenagers lived, whenever he received a call from one of three women who worked for Epstein.

One of them, he said, had a “proper English" accent. Maxwell was raised in England.

Shawn testified that he never met Maxwell but he once met Epstein in his driveway when Epstein arrived late for a massage. He said Epstein “introduced himself and showed off his car.”

He said the teenagers would exchange their $100 bills at a Palm Beach gas station for smaller bills because no businesses in West Palm Beach would accept the large bills.

Millions of children in America became eligible to receive the COVID-19 vaccine this week. And some officials are sweetening the deal by including them in various incentive programs.

In New York City, children can claim $100 if they get their first dose of Pfizer's vaccine at city-operated vaccine site. Alternatively, they can get tickets to city attractions such as the Statue of Liberty or the Brooklyn Cyclones baseball team. The incentive program was already available to other New Yorkers who got vaccinated.

"We really want kids to take advantage, families take advantage of that," Mayor Bill de Blasio said Thursday. "Everyone could use a little more money around the holidays. But, most importantly, we want our kids and our families to be safe."

In Chicago, health officials are also offering $100 gift cards for children ages five to 11 when they get the shots at Chicago Public Health events or clinics, officials said.

Plus, the Chicago school district — one of the largest in the nation — is closing on November 12 for Vaccination Awareness Day to make it easier for students to get their shots.

"It is rare that we make a late change to the school calendar, but we see this as an important investment in the future of this school year and the health and wellbeing of our students, staff, and families," Chicago Public Schools Chief Executive Officer Pedro Martinez said in a message to parents.

The perks come after the U.S. Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention on Tuesday cleared children as young as 5 for smaller vaccination doses, making most Americans eligible for the shots.

In Texas, San Antonio officials announced that parents and guardians who help their children get vaccinated at a public health clinic may claim a $100 gift card for H-E-B grocery stores. And in neighboring Louisiana, officials said the 5-11 age group could soon also claim $100.

In Minnesota, officials launched the "Kids Deserve a Shot" program intended to bolster vaccine numbers among those ages 12 and 17, officials said. The state is offering a $200 visa card as well as the opportunity to enter a raffle for a $100,000 college scholarship or a Minnesota experience prize package.

However, it's unclear if the various incentives will help bolster the vaccine numbers.

A study published last month in JAMA Health Forum found that incentive lotteries organized by 19 states did not seem to work.

However, the researchers speculated that lotteries may be less enticing than actual cash for vaccines.

A survey in May from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 47% of people who say they want to "wait and see" before being vaccinated said paid time off to get it would make them more likely to do so, and 39% said a financial incentive of $200 from their employer would work.

Overall, the U.S. has fully vaccinated more than 58% of the total population as of Thursday, according to CDC data.

As some Americans begin receiving up to $600 in stimulus checks, the possibility of more direct payments is in limbo in the Senate Wednesday.

After the House on Monday night approved a standalone measure to increase direct payments from up to $600 per individual to $2,000, it then went to the Senate. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked efforts Tuesday for a fast-tracked vote on the measure. In response, Senator Bernie Sanders blocked a planned vote to override President Donald Trump’s veto of a national defense bill until there is a vote on the direct payments.

Later in the day, McConnell suggested tying together votes on two bills later in the week; one on the House-passed bill to increase larger direct payments and one on a measure that would allow the $2,000 payments only if a commission to study election fraud is established and parts of Section 230 are repealed.

In signing the $900 billion COVID relief package along with the larger government funding bill on Sunday night, President Trump said he wanted larger direct payments, as well as an investigation into unfounded claims of election fraud. Earlier this month he vetoed the national defense bill because it did not make changes to Section 230, which provides protections for internet platforms and technology companies.

On Tuesday morning, McConnell had said the Senate would start the process to address those priorities from the president.

Many Democrats oppose connecting the issues together, and would likely vote against the broader measure, according to the Washington Post.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi held her weekly press conference Wednesday morning, and called on McConnell to allow a vote on the increased payments. When asked if she would take up the measure again next week after new members of Congress are sworn in, she repeated her hope for getting it done this year.

“Let’s be hopeful it happens this week. The sooner it happens the sooner they go out," Pelosi said, referring to the $2,000 stimulus checks.

The Senate is scheduled to be back in session Wednesday afternoon. It’s unclear whether there will be any movement or discussion about the larger direct payments or any plans for a vote at this time.

If the larger direct payment amount is approved, the Treasury Department would send Americans the difference.

Gone are the days of running to the ATM in order to get cash to tip your server or hair stylist. If cash was going out of style before the pandemic, consider its reputation ruined by infection concerns that have pushed consumers toward cashless alternatives — especially when it comes to tipping.Apps like Venmo, Cash App and PayPal let users easily facilitate peer-to-peer payments. And Apple and Google both have their own digital payment and wallet services.But while cashless tipping may be a consumer convenience, does it benefit service workers who have traditionally relied on cash tips?Bigger tips as a matter of convenienceDigital payment systems often give customers the option to select a pre-calculated tip which, according to several companies that offer these services, often result in larger tips.For example, digital payment company Square allows merchants to select between a "smart tip" or a custom tip. When smart tip is turned on, transactions of less than $10 offer four tipping options: No Tip, $1, $2 or $3. For a transaction of $10 or more, the available tipping options are: No Tip, 15%, 20% or 25%. The custom tip setting allows businesses to select their own options.Another cashless payment service, Youtip uses QR codes to facilitate digital tipping and offers similar pre-calculated options for users called "Quick Tips." After scanning a QR code, users are prompted to either enter a tip amount or select a "Quick Tip" option, which is a fixed amount set by the system or the business.According to the company's data, over 70% of tips processed through the system are either a "Quick Tip" selection or higher, Sarah Taveprungsenukul, Youtip co-founder and chief commercial officer, told CNN Business.One lodging business that adopted Youtip's system reported that it saw housekeeping tips rise from an average of $14 to $21 with the implementation of the QR codes and customized "Quick Tip" prompts, according to Youtip's data.Tippy, another digital payment service, has seen similar increases. Originally created for the beauty industry, Tippy's data shows that not only are people tipping more often when its cashless system is used, but the average tip has increased 11% since early 2020."We're encouraging people to tip more because we're doing the calculation for them," Terry McKim, Tippy's founder and CIO, told CNN Business.Cashless options are also changing tipping norms, encouraging tips for workers who don't usually receive them, like fast food servers or fitness instructors, according to Taveprungsenukul."Tipping is everywhere and even the places where it isn't, maybe it should be," she said. "We're working with a lot of groups, for example in quick-serve restaurants, where they're implementing our solution."The downsides of cashless tipsDespite the convenience of cashless payments and tips, some service workers still prefer cash. For example, some workers don't have access to the banking tools necessary to accept and process digital payments, Clara Wheatley-Schaller, political director at Workers United NY NJ, told CNN Business."With anything that is cashless tipping, that would be the main concern: making sure the money is accessible and going directly to the worker," she said.More than 80% of workers represented by Workers United, which represents a variety of service workers, experience some kind of wage theft, according to the union's survey data. When customers add tips on their credit card, the money doesn't always go directly to the worker. Those tips might get cut due to processing fees, for example. Because of this, some workers don't trust that they're getting all their cashless tips. Handing cash directly to a worker is the safest way to ensure they are getting the entirety of their tip, Whetley-Schaller said.D. Taylor, president of Unite Here, a union representing workers in the hotel and food service industries, has observed that workers benefit when there are pre-calculated tip options. But he said the union has struggled to find solutions that make cashless tipping easy for both the consumer and the worker. Most digital payment companies take a cut of the tips paid through their services, and it can be hard to ensure that tips are going to the intended workers, Taylor said.Tippy, for example, said it charges businesses a flat annual rate of $300 for the use of its services. And, instead of charging workers processing fees for using its software, the service charges the customer leaving a tip a fee for use of the system. Similarly, Youtip applies a service fee to the person paying the tip, but businesses have the option to cover that fee for customers.Another issue with digital tipping: taxes. While both cash and digital tips are taxable, cash is self-reported, so it's easier for some payments to remain under the table. But, as tipping on credit cards has grown more popular in past years, paying taxes on tips is "old news," Taylor said.For workers who are used to taking cash tips without always reporting them, digital tipping might actually alleviate their tax concerns. Although they'll have to pay taxes on their tips, using digital payment services can increase tips enough to offset the cost of taxes, said David Tashjian, Tippy's CEO and president.Adapting to a cashless economy is "not even a question of interest. It's going to happen," Taylor said. "The real question is how can the fruits of labor be rewarded? And how is that done in a way that they are the beneficiaries of it as opposed to someone taking a cut that had nothing to do with their labor, but just developed an app?"

MASON, Ohio — The Cincinnati area’s biggest amusement park is encouraging its guests to leave the cash at home.

Starting in mid-July, all Kings Island locations will only accept credit or debit cards or an online payment form like Apple Pay or Google Pay, a news release from park spokesperson Chad Showalter said.

For visitors without card or online-based forms of payment, the park will offer kiosks in five locations across the park that will transfer cash to a card which can be used anywhere, not just at Kings Island or Soak City Water Park.

Each card can be loaded with up to $500 and must have a minimum of $5.

The park's website said going cashless will allow them to conduct contact-less transactions.