I'm making this post because as one of the moderators of the various
Delphi Lists one of my duties is to help screen all the mail that comes into
the servers to be forwarded on to our membership, and deleting all the spam
and OT messages we get bombarded with so that you don't have to. It regards
a situation I got involved in myself as a way of helping international law
enforcement in their fight against the kind of scams I'm about to tell you
of.
About three months ago, I noticed that I had been deleting the same
message over and over from the various lists. It was advertising business
opportunities with a company supposedly in India, and included name,
address, and other basic information, but was delivered through a yahoo
account.
I wrote to this company asking that they remove us from their
mailing list as I normally do when I notice constant abuse from one firm or
another, but I heard nothing back. The mistake I made was sending my
request through my own personal e-mail address, because they obviously added
my name to their "suckers" list as the FBI calls it.
About two weeks ago I received from the same person, an e-mail sent
to my personal address asking if I wanted to participate in their expansion
as they built up representatives for their textile business here in the USA.
And the message went on to say that because their acceptance of any payments
from US companies in return for goods received under wholesale laws, cost
them a 25% tax, they wanted me to act as their go-between and accept these
payments from the companies and then after taking out my commission of 10%,
send the balance directly back to them as an individual. This way they
would only pay a 5% tax on the net amount.
Of course I knew right away that this is a fraudulent scheme, so I
did not answer them but instead contacted the FBI. And because they hadn't
heard through their IC3.gov website of this particular person or company,
they asked me to reply and let them know what happened next.
I did, and I received an e-mail from the same person about four days
ago telling me that I would be receiving a contract from them in short
order, and that I would also be receiving checks from one of their clients
here soon as well.
Yesterday, I received in the mail, a hand-addressed envelope
postmarked from the Republic of Togolaise, which is somewhere in Africa, in
which I found four US travelers checks made out to me, each in the amount of
$1500 US dollars. At the same time I received an e-mail, again from the
same party, telling me that as soon as I received these checks, I should get
them cashed, and then take the $6000 dollars minus my commission of $600
dollars, and send it to them by Western Union. It went on to say that as
soon as they were in receipt of their money and knew they could trust me, I
would be receiving more checks, and that once I had transferred a total of
$50,000 for them, my commission would go up to 12%.
Finally, the e-mail also included the names, phone numbers, and
addresses of three Western Union offices near me, and as I'm in a rural area
that really amazed me. Also a fairly long diatribe about how this was
perfectly legal and I was taking on no risk as these were Travelers Checks
from my own country and had to be paid for in advance...things like that.
At the FBI's further instructions I took the checks to a large
banking establishment here to be looked at. They passed every form of
counterfeit detection including built-in microdot validation, and so would
have been cashed by almost any bank I had an account with! But upon further
investigation, which included verification of the numbers on the check, it
was found that these numbers were never actually issued by the company that
makes the checks themselves!
Everything is now in the hands of the FBI, Interpol, and as I was
told, the Canadian Mt. Police, but I wanted to bring this to everyone's
attention in hopes that no one would ever consider trying to cash any such
checks they might receive by these circumstances. Had I done so, not only
would I owe the cashing bank $6,000, but could also then have been arrested
for passing counterfeit checks! At the very least the legal hassles would
have been annoying, but knowing the way our law enforcement works, it could
I think get a lot worse!
from Robert Meek dba Tangentals Design CCopyright 2006
Proud to be a moderator of "The Delphi Lists" at elists.org
(["An unused program is the consequence of a higher logic!", nil]) As
written in The Compendium of Accepted Robotic and Surrlogic Theorems Used in
the Self Analysis of Elemental Positronic Pathways...1st Edition Revised
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