As some of you know, I’m a musician by trade. I recently formed a brass quintet to perform for weddings. I joined a national wedding listing site, put up my info and connected with wedding planners in my area. All good.
A couple days ago, I got contacted by text to play a wedding on June 20. It was the bride and she wanted my information to forward to her fiance to finish up the deal. Okay, fine, maybe they didn’t want to contact me through the wedding site I’m listed with. I send her my contact info.
He emails me back asking if the date is okay and how much we cost. I quote him a price once I find out that it’s in San Francisco “at a private home”. Okay, no problem. In my quote email, I ask him to give me a call so I can discuss a few details with him like song selection and lockdown requirements. (I was planning on the restrictions to ease in three weeks.)
I should note at this time that the emails and texts were in poor English. Broken sentences, odd word choices, etc.
He calls me on the phone. He has an accent so thick you could spread it with a knife. I can barely understand him. I can’t say what his native language would be, I’m terrible with that sort of thing. My first impulse was African, but again, I really don’t know.
He’s asking for an invoice, so I say sure, that’s business, I’ll get one to you later today. He wants to pay in advance and didn’t blink about the price. Unusual, but it happens. Then I get this email:
Uhhh… riiiiight. Smells fishy to me. What I’d like help with is:
Does this smell fishy to you too?
Is there a resource out there where I can look up how to identify scams? Just to back up my suspicions?
If you have to ask, the answer is almost always yes. Not sure exactly how this one works with a charge card, but i suspect he’ll charge back whatever you put on his card as soon as you send the funds to the “videographer” via some method that does not allow chargebacks.
Transferring money to them from your account is the goal of the scammer. They get money to you through a variety of fraudulent means, such as a fake check, fake cashiers check, or stolen credit card. You think the transaction is legit and you transfer the extra money to them through a bank transfer, which they immediately withdraw. When the fake check or CC charge is discovered, they reverse the charge and you lose the full amount that the scammer gave you.
For example, they send you a check $1500 for a $1000 purchase. You deposit $1500 and send them the extra $500. After 10 days the bank figures out the check was fraudulent and they pull $1500 from your account.
Anytime someone pays you extra for something and asks you to refund the extra part of the payment, it’s a scam.
Offer a counter proposal that he have his “videographer” charge his card and then pay you instead.
I’ve always found it amusing to see why that isn’t possible.
In my case I was selling a car and I was supposed to pay the transporter. For some reason it was impossible for the transporter to pay me when he picked up the car.
In addition to the obvious points above, the whole thing about the videographer’s children is typical scamification language. They always try to bring in some kind of orphan story or otherwise supposedly sympathy inducing situation. Also the “God bless you” thing at the end. They think people will trust them more if they get all religious, though it’s contrary to standard U.S. business practice.
You should string him along as far as you can, and when he asks you to “pay the videographer,” pretend to do that. When he doesn’t get the money, say you had some number wrong, and then pretend to resend it. Keep doing things like that so he has to come up with more and more bullshit reasons why its most important that you send the money. Then say you are pleasantly surprised to discover that you actually know the videographer and you paid him in cash after going to visit him with his orphan children and how happy they are and looking forward to the wedding. See how far you can go wasting his time and getting his scammy hopes up.
I frequently get scammers trying to get me to go to their website so they can hack into our hotel software. All I can think is “and you can live with yourself?”. I told the last guy our computers don’t have web browsers. He kind of floundered
This guy is still trying to get hold of me. I blocked his phone number and tagged his emails as spam. I’m not the person to string anything out to torture him. I don’t have time in my life to be a dick back, even though he has it coming.
I noticed all the little hallmarks, too. It’s funny, but they didn’t show up until that last email. I started to be suspicious when the odd language use and no haggling over price happened, but I was giving him the benefit of the doubt.
Funny thing… it’s such a piddly amount, in the larger scheme of things.
I’m in the wedding industry as a photographer, and, yes, we get hit a lot by these types of scams. I find them pretty obvious, and yours is definitely one of them. Expect to get more, and if you have your number listed, expect to get the occasional text from scammers. The odd English is a red flag, the “God Bless You” at the end also flags it for me and, of course, the whole financial transaction, which is an age-old scam, usually done with cashier’s checks, but looks like they’ve expanded to credit cards. As you do more work and interact with wedding clients more, you’ll get a sense of how normal clients talk and how scammers talk. That said, I have had Nigerian clients with that style of writing, so I have to be careful not dismiss out-of-hand, but if you get to email #2 and they’re requesting a convoluted financial transaction, no.
For me, it’s always somebody requesting something other than a wedding, like a family reunion, a birthday party, etc. And they seem to be willing to throw any amount of money at it, and the event details are very vague. My favorite one was from about 10 years ago where they actually did give the address of the event, but apparently didn’t do their research on Chicago’s streets, as the address they gave, were it to exist, would be at least a mile into Lake Michigan.
