Oh, first time I hear this, thanks for the information!
One thing this might turn out to be is a fake embezzlement scam with an overpayment scam built-in; the buyer sees your prices and expresses surprise that they are so reasonable; the project budget has three times that amount set aside for purchasing your widgets!
Now this is an opportunity not to be missed - all you need to do is to provide a copy invoice with inflated prices that are three times the actual cost; obviously on this basis, you will need to act as a middle party for the payment - the buyer scammer will send you a cheque for three times the true value - you will cash this into your own account and then pay one third of that amount to your company, send one third of the amount back to the buyer scammer (via some irrevocable transfer method) and keep one third for yourself.
Then their cheque bounces, but the money you sent to the scammer is gone. The scammer may never have even been interested in trying to obtain the product.
The USA is not like your country.
We have so many scammers that now there are opposite scams where seemingly honest people pose as scam victims to get the banks to reimburse them for the “scammer’s” charges. Which their pal, another scammer, put on them in the first place.
Pretty quickly the banks learned to not trust their customers any more than any other group of criminals.
It’s a right mess.
I see. And what’s the way out of this? Nobody can trust nobody else anymore. Seems the society is going south.
It’s really obvious. A lot of these scams (including the OP) rely on the fact that the US banking system is stuck in the 1800s.
When I write a check for 1000 dollars on a cigarette paper and write “Bank of Griffin” at the top and deposit it into your account, it will appear as if I’ve just paid you 1000 dollars. The bank will go ‘yup you have a check, here’s the money’. If you look at your balance the 1000 dollars will be there (probably with a hold so you can’t actually withdraw it, but it will be there on your statement) . A few days later the bank will finally get round to realizing there is no such bank and it’s just cigarette paper, and yank the money (plus a fee probably). In that time I can convince you that I overpaid you by 500 dollars and you need to repay me, I get away with 500 dollars of real money, you get nothing.
There is NO REASON it needs to take that long. It made sense when checks had to be physically transported from one bank to another. Nowadays banks process inter-bank transactions in microseconds. There is no reason it should take more than 30 seconds for the bank to realize there is no such bank and no such account.
They just don’t want to modernize because they like the system as it is.
This isn’t about trust. No financial system was ever based on trusting customers, almost every financial tradition is there to try and prevent fraud. It’s just in this case the tradition is centuries out of date.
I love those scripts when you play along like.
Hey Anna, do you want to have lunch today?
I’d love to. What about the place we went last time?
OMG, I thought you were my friend Anna. I must have had the wrong number.
So what about the response clued you in that it wasn’t Anna?
Not to dispute any of your excellent points, but I think there’s a “least common denominator” factor at work in the US. As long as there’s a system which has to accommodate everything from Chase, Citi et.al. to the Ma and Pa Kettle Bank of Hooterville, there’s going to be a lot of inertia and resistance to change (which is one reason for the ridiculously late adoption of chip&pin).
Which is absolutely no excuse, though it will be used as one.
For any of those interested in how physical checks work in the United States, here is the process with a correction from Railer13 later in the thread.
“ChatGPT, make this offer look less scammy”.
Worse than that, even. If you specifically ask your bank if they’ve confirmed that the deposit is legit, they’ll say yes, even though they haven’t. And if you rely on their statement that it’s legit (because after all, they’re the bank, shouldn’t they know?), you’re still on the hook.
Could be, or if some are to be believed, scammers were never bad at writing scam emails, they just faked it so as to filter out potential timewasters who wouldn’t go the distance.
But after doing that for a long time, everyone thinks scams are always possible to detect because of their errors and so a new blindspot exists to be exploited.
I’ll suggest that scams aimed at businesses have always been different from scams aimed at gullible citizens. I think @Mangetout nailed this one: they’re looking for an overpayment scam and will happily pay an embezzlement commission to get it done. So they’re dangling two baits on two hooks and will adjust the subsequent play depending on which entity in the victim company responds.
What has happened in the OP’s case is that an ordinary citizen has gotten a business-oriented scam solicitation. As more and more one person consultancies, gig workers, and such work to appear as larger businesses than they are, this goof will become more common. Plus of course, when sending email is substantially free, it’s easier cheaper to blindly send 10,000 emails to 9,000 no-hopers and 1,000 prospects than it is to carefully filter the 10,000 candidates and then send 1,000 emails to the legit plausible targets of your particular scam.
e.g My own email address is associated with the domain of a larger company I once owned. I’m retired, the company is long gone, but the domain and my email address live on. Various echos of the past are still out there in search results that would lead a random person to believe there’s a going concern behind my email. Nope.
Silly question, yet what are your account details? I don’t mean you specifically, yet at the bottom of every check I wrote 30 years ago was my account number and sort code. And (at least in the UK) those granted direct deposit access can bill you whatever they want, and then you dispute it with the bank, and inside a month or two it might be settled.
Or to put it another way, let’s pretend I am a total scammer. What information do I need to know from you to pull funds from your account? I likely already know your account number, sort code, address name and date of birth. I reckon ff the final gatekeepers to opening up a credit line in your name are your Social, mother’s maiden name, place of birth, first car, first pet’s name, it won’t be all that difficult to do so.
ETA: I’ve wrote about the disputes amongst myself and brothers, particularly one of them (middle brother). Not long ago, the oldest was warned that someone was trying to open accounts in his name. Now the middle brother would have much of the required numbers and such at hand. I’m just trying essentially to find out when you’ve handed your financial info to the “wallet inspector”
Yup, same here, except in the US we usually call it “routing number”, not “sort code” (I assume those are the same thing). And it’s been a while, but I’m pretty sure those two numbers and my name were all I had to give to my landlord to set up recurring autopay.
Oh yeah. No excuse here - I have two USA accounts that I’ll close out once my mother’s house is sold. Technically, it’s also my address in the USA.
I’m not sure if the oldest brother was part of one of those monitoring plans that will alert you, yet alerted he was. And the middle brother could provide a lot more details than some email scammer.
I’m not worried as my credit rating is pretty shitty - though just signing up with Cabelas and perusing shotguns (wonder why?) had them give me a $2,000 credit line that I have since closed out. I do not recall giving them my social or anything but my USA address.
Obviously, you have scammed me if I send you funds via your acct/routing number. The case is closed when I tell the bank I approved and initiated the transaction. Same with crypto. I don’t know if I have a fallback if middle-brother tries the same with me - other than I was in the UK and did not apply for any USA credit lines.
I hate than - even here - your birthday and a couple secret questions can approve someone to control an entire account.
I too am mystified. Two numbers that generally are open for perusal and not hidden can, and just like you, grant this sort of access. I generally shun it and (besides the deposit) will ask the landlord to accept money sent if I’m a month ahead.
Yet sometimes there’s no choice. Github and others do it, Digital Ocean, my car insurance.
Okay, enough hijacking the topic. The OP wasn’t emailed an invoice with his bank details all there. I know the scam between my two brothers was one was trying to commit fraud yet was denied.
Even worse, there are cases where people will take a check into their bank and say, “I think this is fraudulent. What do I do?” They are then instructed to deposit it to start the process and are later arrested when the bank notifies the police they knowingly deposited a fraudulent check.
What would the circumstances be for people to deposit a check they suspected of being fraudulent?
The “here’s a check to do secret shopping.” or something like that. Or the overpayment scam. The reason they deposit it is the bank tells them to.
It’s possible, but any sales person worth their salt is going to google the name of supposed trading company.
In international trade, talk is cheap and qualifying potential partners is a key step.
I wonder if they are looking for desperate or greedy people who aren’t going to do even the bare minimum leg work.