I have a client that states he is sending over a wire transfer from England. He put his location as SHEFFIELD ENGLAND and gave me a complete address and phone number. He states the wire transfer is enroute, but I have heard this before from Nigerian scammers, who later follow stating there is a problem with the bank, and they will send me a check in the mail. The check gets here, of course, for too much money and they ask me to send them money back. You all know the rest of the story.
So my question is, here in the US we have whitepages.com, yellow pages.com, etc. that we can use to verify who a person is. We also have various local sites to verify addresses, homeowners, and the like from public records.
How would I go about doing the same for someone in England?
I am holding a car for this man and do not want to hold it for him if I can not verify who he is. (By the way, an international wire transfer can take up to 4 days to come through).
I’m not entirely sure what information you are clooking for but you might have some luck at www.postoffice.co.uk , you need to create an account that allows you 12 searches per 24 hour period but it is free.
When the money comes through, don’t forget to inform your bank of your suspicions. They might be able to call the bank in the UK to check if everything is OK.
Our bank always checks for suspicious activity no matter what. Also, don’t forget that ol’ Uncle Sam is monitoring all international wire transfers (and probably non-international also).
Once the money is in the account, we are totally safe and protected by our bank.
Dunno - I sell a fair bit of stuff on eBay and it’s my impression that most people do actually screw up the entry of their postal address in some way or other -including ALL CAPS* - addresses that I can simply paste into a label for printing are the rarity.
*(with some people I know, hitting the Caps Lock button is a default action, after turning on the computer each day - I suspect there are plenty of these folks elsewhere too)
I’m not convinced that confirming that the address exists serves to demonstrate the guy’s identity. For example, you could be getting the money from an account opened in the name of a victim of identity theft.
Once again, thanks jjimm for all of the help. Hopefully this turns out to be good. JJIMM went out of his way to help me out and confirmed the address as being legitimate, and the number as being a cell phone number.
I will keep everyone posted as to what happens and the status of the wire transfer.
Oh, and GorillaMan, you are right, it could be someone else’s money stolen from a bank account. But that is up to the banks to confirm, and is almost impossible for us to do so, same as a local wire transfer.
Hmmm, I wouldn’t assume you wouldn’t get stung. If it’s stolen money, then even a long way down the line, it might be possible for the banks to try to reclaim it. (I’ve heard of similar things happening with advance-fee-fraud where forged foreign cheques, for example, have been discovered months later.)
The cellphone number isn’t a good sign at all, if it had been a land based line its easier to confirm that it belongs to the address.
Still, once the wire transfer is in, you should be able to confirm when it has cleared, and that is often a differant time to when its supposed to have arrived in your account.
There is one scam (not the Nigerian one as you mentioned) where they send you a bogus cheque, have you wire the extra back and eventually the cheque bounces (causing you to lose what you sent them).