Does this sound fishy? (Web-payment, poss. credit card scam?)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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Hi all. I do the web design for an author who uses a basic PayPal payment page for her online shopping cart. Works fine, no problems so far. She doesn’t have many online buyers – most people who purchase go through the 1-800 phone number that’s run by her book distributers. She also sends out books on her own, but as I said, most people go with the toll-free number.

Anyway, now she’s received an email out of the blue from a guy from Taiwan who wants to buy 100 copies of her book. The author wants to push him to pay her directly, rather than go through the distributor, because this way she doesn’t have to pay the exhorbitant fee to her distributors (she loses about 75% of each sale to them). But since she doesn’t have a merchant account (she doesn’t want to pay the fees), the only option is using the PayPal form.

Rather than using the standard form, which has a fairly low S&H fee hard-coded into it, the author wants me to set up a unique page specifically for this potential customer, together with a (pricier) shipping/handling fee.

That’s all fine. But this guy has now told her that though he has an “American credit card,” he can only make payment by sending the number via email, rather than through a webpage.

This seems … odd to me. Does it set off any alarm bells with you guys? Is Taiwan blocked from using online payment systems? That seems hard to believe. If not, why would anyone prefer to send a credit card number through email – an incredibly insecure method – rather than going through PayPal’s secure system? I know many people don’t like/trust PayPal, but that doesn’t appear to be the case here; this guy seems to be unwilling to go through any web payment system.

Yet I don’t even know what I’m worried about. Credit card fraud, I guess. What if this is a stolen card number and the author sends out the books only to have the charge disputed?

Could this be a scam? Or am I being too paranoid?

*ETA: Should I have put this in GQ instead? There is a factual question in here: whether Taiwanese are blocked from online payments for some reason. But it’s almost a rhetorical question 'cause I really don’t think they are. But if this would be better suited for GQ, I’ll ask to have it moved. *

2

Sounds dodgy/fishy to me and I’d have none of it…

3

Yeah. I hear you, SmartAleq.

Got some more info from the author when I asked her for some more details. (Note: she’s Russian, which is why the English is slightly ‘off’):

Alarm bells clanging here. I did a quick lookup of this Moore Access Freight company and found not a single web result. Even my late father’s tiny old company, which closed in 2000 and never had a website, turns up at least one hit on Google!

This seems all too familiar…

4

Sounds dodgy as hell to me, but so does the author, wanting to cut out her distributor and charge extra S&H. Meh – unless you’re her accountant or in some way responsible for her financial well-being, I’d say it’s her decision whether or not she wants to go that route.

FWIW, where I work, we only ship internationally with a $500 minimum and the customer must hire their own freight forwarder, and we only accept payment via credit card – and we have taken orders from Taiwan. The orders are almost always done via phone, since our website does not allow international orders (due to the requirements) or via email, so maybe that makes a difference.

ETA – Upon seeing your latest addition to the thread – yes. This is a scam. We had a similar one tried with us.

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Hiya Litoris. Normally I just try to help my clients, not get involved in their financial stuff, but in a way I’d feel like an accessory (by setting up the webpage allowing her to take this guy’s money), so if I can suss out whether it’s legit beforehand, I’d feel better. Sort of the similar situation to the link in my last post. I can’t help feeling a little responsible for these older, not-very-web-savvy folks. Also, speaking purely as a mercenary, I don’t want this woman to get suckered, considering that I want her solvent enough to pay me! :slight_smile:

Can you add some details about the attempted scam you experienced?

6

If she is supposed to pay the shipping company out of the funds that he pays her, then it is almost definitely a scam.

7

Sounds like the guy is trying to scam her. But even if he wasn’t, why can’t she just take the guy’s cc from the email and then run it through her own website?

8

Yeah, I found an article about another author who was almost taken in by a very similar-sounding customer (except this one was Nigerian – of course, if this “Antonio Pau Su” dude was from Nigeria I’d have known right away this was fake).

XJETGIRLX, that was our original thought, having her take his info and run it through the website payment, and she probably would have, if not for the fact that she needed a different shipping & handling fee. (The standard S&H rate she charges is $6, and she just wanted to change this to reflect the greater cost to shipping overseas.)

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Here’s a copy of the email we got about it from another company in our industry – just sounds similar to what you have:

I couldn’t find the other email that we got that had more detail (this was a little over a year ago), but the reason we (our company) caught it was that the orders with us went on an automatic hold – we do that with new customers who order large quantities, so we can follow up with them to make sure they meant to order that much. Since we are a wholesale company that also sells to individuals, you can imagine we have had some interesting things happen (customer thinks they need to order the number of bags, not cases of bags and manages to order 10,000 bags when they meant to only order 100).

10

Is hers the type of book for which even a legitimate buyer would need 100 copies?

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Thanks, Litoris, that’s helpful. Am I reading this correctly in that a competitor is the one who sent out that warning email? If so, that’s surprisingly civic-minded of them! Nice to see there’s a community looking out for one another.

Sigmagirl, this Antonio dude claims to have a store (not online, natch) and plans to resell the books.

12

Yeah, it was a competitor – we can be a friendly bunch. We’re competitive with pricing, but we do look out for one another.

13

So is the scam that the credit card turns out to be fake, after the products have shipped? How would sending the credit-card number by email instead of entering it directly in a webpage help the scammer delay the card validation? Presumably the shipper would validate the card before shipping, right?

14

I have looked and looked for the other email, it was more detailed, but I can’t find it. Like I said, it’s been a while, so I don’t remember everything about it. I shall see if anyone else remembers the details around here.

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Possibly, although I expect the scammer doesn’t really want the books - more likely it’s a fake overpayment scam - he accidentally pays too much, then says he can’t retract the payment, but could you please send the balance back to him by a separate money order. The money order you send goes through (because it’s genuine), his original payment bounces, but only later, after you’ve sent the money order.

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Thanks for all the answers, guys. After getting my client to send me the alleged customer’s emails (together with the so-called shipping company), I’ve confirmed that this is utter bushwah.

For those wondering what the point of this particular scam is, it’s basically to rip the seller off of shipping fees. Here’s the email from the “shipper” (who naturally, like all major companies, uses a yahoo.co.uk address). I’ve bolded the parts where the scam is made clear:

Very legitimate-sounding, huh? :rolleyes:

So the idea is, “Antonio” would send the $4,000 or so (including the cost of books) to my client using a stolen credit card. The money might initially go through but since she’d be sending it right back to this shipping company (certainly “Antonio” under a different name), plus the books, this all costs nothing to the scammer. My client would be out the money once it inevitably transpires that the card is stolen.

Here’s an article about another author who was nearly scammed in a very similar way.

My client’s disappointed but glad not to have lost the dough. Thanks for backing me up, all!

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Sorry to bump this up, but today my client sent me a copy of the original email from “Antonio,” and I thought you guys would find it interesting.

It’s amazing. Note how devoid it is of any details – it’s like a psychic’s cold reading. I’m sure the putz sent the message blindly to thousands of people, hoping to find someone who had something to sell.

Sure enough, my client responded to “Antonio” saying that perhaps he’d be interested in two of her titles (naming the books). And thus was the fish hooked. Did she question how he even knew who she was if he’d never been to her website? No. Sigh.

Well I thought this might be edifying, just in case someone else comes across an email like this in the future. At least this tale has a happy ending, unlike many others.

18

Thanks Choie. Luckily for your employer you are a bit more suspicious than her.

19

Sounds like your boss might need Net Nanny or something similar to keep her off teh intarwebz.

20

Always ignore crazy-good orders from far-off places, especially when they involve out of the ordinary payment schemes.