AR, that’s good irony, matey. 
Well, I don’t know how much of this is a “the chicken and the egg” thing, but back when these guys first started running straight 419 scams (“Hello, I don’t know you, but I have $25,000,000 [Twenty Five Million Dollars] that I need to get out of Nigeria…”), part of the reason it worked is that you felt SUPERIOR to these people. You were SUPPOSED to think “How could it be a scam? I’m SMARTER than these third-world people!”
The “the chicken and the egg” bit I’m not sure of is whether this was by design or maybe the scammers that sent 419 emails in “Encrypted English” got better results than ones written in the Queen’s English.
In any case, you’d think those phishers would at least try to get it right, no?
What if you don’t wire anyone any money, but decide to keep 100% for yourself and withdraw all of it the moment the bank lifts the freeze?
I’m guessing that in itself is some form of fraud, but I’m at a loss to see who’d actually complain. (“Uh, yeah, my Nigerian friend and I tried to scam this sucker and it kinda fell through…”)
You mean cash the fake cashier’s check and keep all the money? Your bank will certainly complain when the check turns out to be bogus, I assume that they’ll stick you with the tab and pursue legal action if their moola isn’t returned immediately.
It seems to me, though, that the cash is in my account, and it got there through legal means (from the bank’s POV, at least). The people the bank has a beef with are the yahoos who forged the check and duped us both into thinking it was real.
The only hitch I can see is that I broke the contract I’d made with the scammers, but given that the scammers were making the contract under fradulent pretenses I doubt they’d even try to bring action against me.
If you knowingly deposit a fraudulent check into your account, this is fraud, and you can be prosecuted for it.
But whether you knew the check was fraudulent or not, once the bank determines the deposited check is a fake, they will debit your account the appropriate amount. The original credit didn’t get there through legal means, from the bank’s point of view or anyone elses.
If you deposit a check–any check, fake or otherwise–that bounces, your bank will have a beef with you and only you. They will cooperate within the limits of the law with any investigation about the origins of the check, but your account will be the one debited.
OK. That answers my question.
Some of the time, this is done deliberately in an attempt to bypass simple spam filtering rules - more complex methods like Bayesian analysis will catch more, but if you’re relying on a simple keyword search, you might block anything that contains, say, the words ‘Viagra’, ‘Lesbian’, or ‘Refinance’, but if they’ve been deliberately spelled ‘Vaigra’, ‘Lezzbian’ and ‘Refinanse’, they’ll slip through the net.
Yeah, be careful. I sent a friend an email a bit back and made a joke about offers for ASIAN COED LESBIANS and LOW MORTGAGE RATES and FREE LEGAL CIALIS ONLINE. She found the email a few weeks later when she searched her filtered spam folder. :smack: