Have you heard about the Nigerian Scam? Also known as the 419 Fraud or Advance Fee Fraud? I have because I experienced it first hand.
The email arrived innocently enough. The address seemed like something legitimate from Yahoo. It was a typical availability/cost to rent type email. Call me cold hearted, but the reason she was renting the house set off a red flag. She explained her grandmother has cancer and the doctors in Nigeria recommended she come to the U.S. for treatment.
For my readers who do not live in Atlanta, Big Canoe is not exactly close to a hospital. For those of you who are not familiar with chemotherapy, the last thing you want to be is in a car for longer than 15 minutes...let alone an hour and 15 minutes. But, when I asked her what hospital (by email), she said Gwinnett (an actual hospital in north Georgia) and she was not concerned with the distance.
As we emailed back and forth, her English became more broken and her financial arrangement was not clear. When pressed, this is the explanation I received, "What i mean is that we are not currently on any cash at all to get ourselves a ticket thats why we insist on using the cheque so that after you take your rent and other charges from it ,you will send doen the balance for us to process a ticket for two. thats simply what i mean. I hope you understand now, please reply."
Seems simple enough. She does not get paid until the check clears and I get paid, right? Wrong. Others who fell for this scam are finding out that the check was forged and now they are responsible for the money.
What to do? Do not share personal information. Use a PO Box. Make sure the "From" name in your emails for the general public is something generic like "Big Canoe" or "Caro Consulting" - don't use your last name. As soon as you know it is a scam, report it to the appropriate company. In this case, I sent the entire string to abuse@yahoo.com and they took care of their email account. Unfortunately, there is no way to track down the person and prosecute them.
Here is some more information about counterfeit & phony payments on ClarkHoward.com.
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