The position was not significantly different in Australia when we relied on cheques, 40-50 years ago.
All you need to cash a check is the numbers on it. The signature usually isn’t even seen by anyone. In fact, some online sites accept payment through “electronic check” that doesn’t involve pieces of paper at all, just you typing in the numbers.
Maybe it’s different in the developed world, but that really is how it works in the US.
As an American living in Japan, the lack of security blows my mind.
The old method of making back transfers in Japan wasn’t that secure and relied on the hope that people would be nice.
They tightened things up and have made it much more difficult to transfer money out of someone else’s account.
Of course, scams are the worst problem with people targeting elderly folks to trick them into sending money to the scammer.
Ditto (with the difference that I’m in Europe, specifically Luxembourg, a banking country). When I got here, it was stunning to recognize just how far ahead European banking security really was. And not in a way that makes it harder to use. Overall, it’s simpler to interact with. The US financial network might as well be in the dark ages. It’s nuts.
I’m sure that you meant “enquiry,” and if you did, then we’re both on the same page. It’s an enquiry that could go to any company that produces “units” of stuff: hex nuts, bolts of cloth, windshield wiper blades, teddy bears, you name it, a lot of companies produce “units” of stuff.
Besides that, the enquiry reads as though the OP’s company (which, as the OP implied, doesn’t exist) already has some sort of contract or arrangement with the seller. An invitation to bid on a contract would be appropriate; but assuming a contract already exists and the sender is preparing a purchase order for the OP to fulfil would not be.
Finally, an Oklahoma company with a Czech Republic domain address sends up a red flag. Years ago, on this board, we had somebody asking about the same kind of thing. The sender of the scam e-mail claimed a street address in Calgary though the enquiry came from a foreign domain; I was living in Calgary at the time, and confirmed that the Calgary street address did not exist at all.
OP, I don’t know what the scam is, but I am sure that it is most assuredly a scam. Do not reply, trash the message, and ignore all further communications from Elizabeth Pace.
It’s not incorrect by any means. Bank details, as part of a wider set of personal information, are valuable to scammers who call victims masquerading as their bank and for example telling them there is some dire emergency and they need to assist in moving (the victim’s) money to a ‘safe account’. Phishing for bank account details is a thing because those details are valuable to scammers.
Certainly it’s not straightforward to simply take money out of a bank just by knowing the account and sort code, but these details are still better not shared because they can be misused. Jeremy Clarkson once wrote in a newspaper column that there was no risk in revealing his bank details and he published the bank details in that same column for everyone to see. A short time later someone signed him up for a direct debit to donate to a diabetes charity and he lost £500.
It’s true that the information is printed on the bottom of every cheque you write, but that’s not a good thing in the wider context.
I have probably somewhat overstated my case and OK gaining bank details gives some advantage to scammers but the idea that those details can be used on their own to scam the customer is not correct [you and @Mangetout are describing scamming the bank] nor is it as I understand it the goal of these scams which are as I understand it essentially always either advance fee or overpayment scams.
It is worth noting that the risk profile to business accounts is not necessarily the same as it is to personal accounts. Individuals are much more likely than companies to be targeted by identity theft; bank details alone aren’t usually enough to perform that kind of attack, but they’re part of it.
If I give someone my account details, and they take money out of my account, then I’m the one who has lost out. After that, I might be able to contest it with the bank and get them to reimburse me, at which point the bank becomes the victim, rather than me, but I’m still the victim initially.
And, again, in the US it really is that easy. That’s the way I pay my rent, for instance. I just had to give my landlord my account information, and now they take close to a thousand dollars a month out of my account, forever. I never had to login to my bank to authorize it or anything. And if my landlord can do that, then someone else with that same information (which, again, is on every check I write) could tell the bank that they’re my landlord, and do the same thing. Or, if the bank only trusts that coming from companies that they know are leasing companies, someone else with that information could give that information to their landlord, and get me to pay their rent for them.
I used to work in importing / trading and it doesn’t read like anything I would have written, either to manufactures I had a relationship with or ones I was reaching out to.
Besides not naming the product, another red flag is the question of shipping. Shipping is always calculated to the city rather than the state.
I agree. No typos. No upfront “have your account info ready”. It just doesn’t read as a scam.
I too have an email very close to the spelling of Eddy Merckx, the great cyclist. I even named my limited company after it. I get several Belgian and Dutch emails as someone mistyped every couple days.
ETA: I reckon I missed the intent of Chronos’ post. “Deliberately mis-delivered”. At the least, then, do not reply if they’re just looking for live email addresses. Other than that, do not prepare your unit price per unit and ignore it.
Just to note, there are a lot of scams just surfacing now where there are no typos and none of the usual red flags. Just because it looks clean and well written and coherent, it could still be a scam.
If I remember correctly, there was a similar problem with PayPal some time ago. Someone had the account number of a stranger and was able to use it to pay for orders on PayPal. However, this has been changed. Now PayPal asks for the mobile phone number for confirmation when making payments. Of course, a fraudster could also have obtained this information. But as soon as the payment has been made, an email with the payment information is sent to the account holder. If the payment is not known, it can be disputed.
Fraudsters are now exploiting this and calling people, saying they are from PayPal and claiming that a payment has been made from the account. If the customer wants to dispute the payment, they have to click on a link… and are then redirected to a fraudulent website. I have received countless calls like this. Does this kind of scam happen in the US too?
Agree.
It’s deliberately vague. But somebody who owns or operates a business could easily think to themselves, “Hey, these folks are searching for a vendor and stumbled on me. Why not start talking to them and see whether we can do business? What’s the harm? Opportunities don’t come knocking every day.”
So now some sales guy dreaming of huge commissions calls these folks eager to spill all his company’s beans into Ace Capital International Trading’s "CEO"s lap. Of course by the time the first call with the “CEO” is scheduled and happens, ACE’s actors will have researched what that victim company sells, and wouldn’t you know it, but that’s exactly the stuff we so desperately need.
Soon enough they’ll set the hook and the fish will be caught.
Yeah it’s so irritating. It’s a massive obvious opportunity for fraud like the OP (a scammer the can make a completely fraudulent deposit in your account with no money to back it up, and in the time the Victorian US banking system takes to recognize it as fraudulent and take the money back, they have more than enough time to lean on you for their “refund”). There other gaping holes in the system too, like when I flagged my check books as stolen after they were taken in a home invasion burglary. It turns that doesn’t actually flag them as stolen in the US,and stop people using them. It just means that when anyone uses them they become bad checks on your account! So I was faced with collections on “bad check” I had reported stolen years earlier.
And just in principle it’s so goddamned irritating. Like people are making money on financial transactions where the speed of light from the computer the the exchange are a critical factor. Yet they are telling my refund will take 4 business days to process. Someone is making money investing my cash during those four days!
Texas, huh? That narrows it down…
It reminds me a little of those random texts you get that seem misdelivered, like “What time is the party?”. A well intentioned person responds saying they have the wrong number, to which the scammer says something to gain more responses, like “Oh, thank you! You are such a nice person. It’s hard to meet nice people these days.” The scammer hopes that a conversation ensues and the scammer eventually gets money through a romance or crypto con. It seems like this kind of email would be similar. Someone responds that the email must have been in error, to which the scammer complements them for being honest starts asking about what products they offer since they like dealing with honest companies. Eventually there is some con where they try and get money from the business.
Then shortly after that actual cash money appears in your business account. An actual down payment! Real cold hard cash in your real account. Of course they are legit. And of course the scary looking “official” communication from their lawyer, that arrives shortly afterwards, saying it was 2x what it should have been is legit too. No harm in returning the bit that was sent in error, you get to keep the rest of it, and it’s peanuts compared to the payment that’s coming when you complete the order.
In theory. When this happened to me they refused to cancel it. I lost my phone and it was used to PayPal 3000$ of my money to some rando. Ironically (give all the bitching I’ve done about us banks 
) my bank caught it in time and I was able to cancel the transaction. But PayPal had already given him the money, so said I owed them for the cancelled transaction.
Nothing I could do (including the police report) could convince them until I reported to CFPB and then they finally relented and accepted it as fraud.
I mean, the other big red flag for me personally is that I get emails exactly like the one here, in my scambaiting mailboxes, even the ones that only receive scams and nothing but scams because the email address is on lists circulated amongst scammers.