The person who sends the check can ask for any damn thing they want, that doesn’t mean I have any obligation to them.
Back to the question of sending you their phone number… If your ad had been in the newspaper, you’d put your number in your ad. If you weren’t available to answer, the caller would leave their number for you to call back. How is it different?
You’re going to meet them in person before making a final decision, so just don’t accept any checks until you’re sure they’re legit.
True, but Czarcasm was referring to a situation where someone cashed a check for $10,000 and did refund the $2000 excess payment as the person who sent the check requested them to. That’s why they were out the $2000.
Obviously, if you don’t send them the $2000, then you’re not out that amount. But you may still be liable for any bad check fees that your bank may charge you.
The point of the scam is that the person who sends the check for more than he should have did so in order to get the excess refunded. Usually it’s done in a situation where there would be no reason for the receiver of the check to want to give them credit for future payments, such as a one-time purchase.
I just can’t think of a legitimate reason someone would send me more than the payment. That would be an immediate red alert for me (though I’d probably be thinking more money laundering and less check fraud).
But they wouldn’t be trying this with just you-they are sending out dozens, if not hundreds, of these requests, know that some will fall for it.
Oh, I’m not saying no one falls for it. It just seems so weird, so it seems people would question it.
You’d think that, wouldn’t you? But people don’t always think things through. I’m ashamed to admit that I once sent money to a “friend” I met in a chat room so they could buy medicine, and who promised to repay me when they got paid. Somehow she never got around to sending me the money…but she did try to get me to send her more money later.
See, I don’t know. That’s just understandable to me. Sure you got taken, but you got taken by something that could be plausible.
“My mother bought this cashier’s check for the first and last month’s rent as a birthday present, but I guess in her old age she misheard me, because she wrote it out for $2000 more than the actual amount. Would you mind sending back the $2000 so that she could pay for her medication?”
That kind of plausible?
No, because it can take weeks or months for it to be determined that the check is no good, whereas Federal regulations require the bank to make deposited funds available within 5-10 business days. In a sense, the money is “advanced” by the bank on the assumption that the check is good. But regulations also make the account holder responsible for the funds thus “advanced.”
The bank often cannot tell it’s a worthless check just by looking at it, or even trying to “verify” it. It has to go through the system. Depending on where the check originated, perhaps several systems. Eventually it will either be paid or clearly denied. You don’t know for certain that it’s valid until it has actually been paid.
So if you want to be safe, you do not withdraw or use any money from a deposit until it’s KNOWN to have been paid by the ULTIMATE source (i.e., not an intermediary bank that hasn’t yet collected on the thing itself).
I have paid multiple months in rent before, I used to have a rather dodgy sort of income and wanted to make sure that I had a roof over my head when i had a bit of a windfall in money [i worked in a commission only position, and my draw was $100 a week. When I placed a few people i would prepay rent and stockpile food]
No way. I’d send the check back. Someone who would go ahead and send his mother’s medication money to a complete stranger is not someone I’m going to be doing favors for.
Prepaying makes sense. Sending too much and then wanting me to go through the hassle of refunding doesn’t.
Maybe their phone numbers are charged at a high rate that they get a cut of, if they send the email to a heap of people it could add up pretty quickly for them, or does the local exchange part of the OP rule this out?
I’ve never understood how the “Cheque for more money than the purchase” thing actually works- here in Australia, when you put a cheque in your bank account, you don’t get access to the funds from the cheque until it clears. If it doesn’t clear, you don’t get the money, and that’s all there is to it.
Do banks in the US let you draw on the proceeds of cheques before they’ve cleared? Because if so, that sounds exactly like asking for trouble, IMHO.
What if it’s a money order or traveller’s check from an established company, and when you take it to the bank and ask if it’s legit, the cashier says “Yep. It’s legit!”? Even with all this, the bank can(and definitely will) dun you for the full amount, plus fees and penalties. The cashier’s word is totally useless legally, even if you get it in writing.
The scam is usually done here with money orders, cashiers checks and travellers checks, which are usually “as good as cash!” as the adverts say. The banks don’t worry about about the legitimacy of the checks until later, because the person on the hook for the money if it turns out to be fake is the person cashing the check, not the one who perpetrated the fraud in the first place.
jsgoddess, as has been stated, this is a well-known scam, and people do fall for it.
For example, I frequently get hotel booking requests, that have the same modus operandi.
I don’t own a hotel.
But if I did, and I thought it was a legitimate request, and I received the banker’s draft, and I refunded the money, then I would have fallen for it. The filters that exclude people from that scam are many, but the scammers send out millions of these damn things every day, and a few do get through.
The fact that you’re not at risk from the scam is neither here nor there.
That’s not my understanding of how it works here- if you present the cheque in good faith, then the problem is with the cheque drawer, not the presenter. If it turns out the bank has cleared a dodgy cheque, they have insurance to cover that sort of thing and they go after the drawer to recover it- not the person presenting the cheque.
My sister-in-law had this happen to her.
She was selling a car. Not a great car, but decent. She was hoping for around $1500.
Some guy gets ahold of her via emial stating that he was going to buy a car, but the deal fell through. So he had a money order all made out for $7000. Would she be willing to sell him the car, accept the money order, and then send him back $5000? His agent would be along to collect the cash and the car, as he lives in Texas, works for the UN, and will be out of the country.
She replied “sure! here’s my address.”
Then she called myself and her sister to find out what was up. I told her about the scam. She, ever the optimist, replied that I was just too negative, and maybe this was legit.
Sure enough, a little over a week later a FedEx envelope showed up with a very authentic looking cashiers check written by a bank in, if I recall correctly, Missouri. The mailing address on the FedEx envelope was in Lagos, Nigeria. Imagine my surprise!
She went to her bank and talked to a teller. She stated the deal, and then asked if she could deposit it. They explained that they would deposit it and release some of the funds, but that the rest would have to clear.
She deposited the check, the wrote to her mysterious buyer. She explained what the bank was doing. He wrote back stating that he needed the extra money quite badly for his work, and could she send him a money order for the difference?
She replied that she would do so once the check was fully released, and not before. As a business man, she was sure he would understand. That was the last communication she received from him.
The money order bounced, but as she had essentially treated it like it wasn’t real in the first place, she was alright.