I’ve very nearly just been scammed. And so has my good friend.
My situation: Mr. spockerel was getting out of the satellite business and attempting to sell his sat meter via Craigslist. Temperamental but nearly sane-seeming buyer contacted us in broken but readable English, then proceeded to send us a check for $2,330 more than our asking price. And then asked us to forward the extra money to her “shippers” because it was “the secretary’s mistake.” Pretty big mistake.
We said no, and Crazy Person flipped out with multiple nasty-grams, including one that said she was forwarding our information to the FBI. :dubious: So then we shipped the check back to its bitchy sender. Mr. spockerel called the issuing bank and was told that they’d received over** 300** calls on the same kind of situation, and had closed the accounts that had been involved.
My friend: was looking for a roommate, found a guy who said he was moving from “the U.K.” and wouldn’t describe himself or listen to descriptions of the house. He sent them a check for $3,500 and asked them to forward the extra money to Malaysia. My friend and her roommate were leery and had just refused to accept the money when she and I had a really revelatory conversation about this.
I’m thinking that our names were going to get put on shipments of drugs/ivory/slaves/contraband.
And this person didn’t claim to be a disowned Nigerian prince attempting to give me his fortune in return for my prayers for his sister with smallpox.
I’m still kind of stunned.
So, 1.) Watch out if you’re Craigslisting, and 2.) anybody have any idea on what’s going on here? Got any good scam stories?
That’s a very common scam. They send you way too much, you send a refund, then the cashier’s check bounces (which can take a while) and you’re out the refund money, the fees, and the item. Often they don’t care about the item itself, they’re just looking for the cash.
Huh. Clearly I’m not up on my scams. I suppose it was most significant that it happened to me and my friend in the same town, at the same time, with nearly the same scenario.
Still, cold shivery feeling at what almost happened to us.
A friend of mine advertised some furniture on craigslist recently and had the same experience. The person couldn’t even spell the name of the city they purported to live in correctly (a two word name spelled as one word).
Yeah, that’s an old scam. After you send out the ‘surplus’ money, you will find that the check you received has bounced. So you are out of the money you sent, and perhaps out of the item you were trying to sell also.
The trick uses the fact that
a) banks are legally required to put the money from the check into your bank account within a fairly short time (a day or so), but
b) they are not able to verify every check within that time; however,
c) there is apparently a loophole which allows the bank to take their sweet time investigating the check, and then taking the money out of your account again when it turns out to be fake.
So you receive a check from your friendly neighborhood scammer, you cash it, and the money appears in your bank account. All seems right with the world. Being an honest person, you send the extra money to wherever the scammer asked you to send it. A week or so later, the bank curtly informs you that the check was false after all, so they took the money out again.
Gee, I feel quite stupid. Apparently I’m the only person ever who had never heard about this. But now I can contact the Secret Service.
Thank you, smart and scam-literate Dopers.
To be fair, it is not a particularly naive or unreasonable assumption that once a check has cleared and the money has been deposited into your bank account, it is going to stay there. I’ve always been surprised that this behavior on the bank’s part is legal. It seems to me that you’re being scammed by two different parties here, and if it happened to me I’m not sure which of the two I would be most angry with…
I’m surprised banks aren’t doing their part in stopping this activity and informing their customers when depositing large non-payroll checks.
“When will this check clear and the funds be available for withdrawl?” needs a better answer than “10 to 12 business days.” Banks need to tell people that a check can be found to be bad months later and they will be on the hook for the money.
But then again when have banks ever tried to help their customers?
I agree; with the prevalence of this kind of scamming, banks ought to be closing that loophole and doing better at check cashing. I suppose they don’t care because it doesn’t hurt them in the pocketbook, but it seems like an obvious need to me.
Of course, the bank is kind of caught between a rock and a hard place, assuming that it is indeed not technically feasible to verify each check within the legally imposed deadline.
But then it’s a bad law; it would have been better to have a law saying that the bank can take however long it needs to clear the check, but once the money has appeared in your account it’s yours. That way, banks could compete with each other on efficient check processing, and if a bad check still slipped through the bank would be required to eat the loss. You may sometimes have to wait a month before you can spend the money, but that’s still better than spending the money first and then discovering a month later that you spent money you didn’t have.
The current situation, whereby the money seems to appear in your account before the legal deadline but you apparently cannot assume that it’s actually yours, is worse than what the situation would probably be with no law at all.
Originally posted by Spockerel:
" I’m thinking that our names were going to get put on shipments of drugs/ivory/slaves/contraband."
I would advise to keep the ivory (illegal to import, it is contraband) and send the rest of the stuff (drugs/slaves/contraband) back. Start scrimshawing. (can you make scrimshaw a verb without the language police showing up on your doorstep ?)
It was a tutoring gig to tutor a football playing guy. He wanted to go to college, but his parents were afraid he wouldn’t have the grades to get in. They were pretty desperate, willing to pay $50-$75 an hour.
Sounds too good to be true, right?
In the reply e-mail, the male, senior football player magically turned into a fifteen year old girl who was coming to America to study abroad. Now if I could just reroute some money for her and take care of her/him (they kept switching genders throughout the mail) for a little while…
I was a credit union teller for almost a year and we had many people come in with these scams. We did warn them it was a scam and explained the entire thing and how it works. 90% of the time they would insist on trying anyway (Michigan’s economy has been in the shitter for years; it was sad seeing the desperate hope that they were clinging to with the check. :(). We’d put a note on their account that said we had discussed it.
They always bounced.
There was one guy, we at least managed to convince him to put a longer hold than is legally necessary (we’re talking a 20 day business hold). We showed him how it didn’t say that he had to wire the cash back within a certain amount of time, so he could be a bit patient and see how the check will bounce, but it won’t take his money with it. He agreed… and the check was returned. At least it didn’t screw him over, but he had tears in his eyes* when he saw he couldn’t get the money.
We had a bunch of people who had lost their jobs; he was one of them. These people are why I hate scammers. It’s not simple greed that tempted them, but the chance of being able to not worry about feeding their family for a bit.
Pretty big mistake.