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Warning: Fraud attempt

In this morning's email:

Good Day,

I am Mr. Alfred Cheuk Yu Chow, the Director for Credit & Marketing Chong
Hing Bank, Hong Kong, Chong Hing Bank Center, 24 Des Voeux Road Central,
Hong Kong. I have a business proposal of $ 38,980,369.00.

All confirmable documents to back up the claims will be made available
to you prior to your acceptance and as soon as I receive your return
mail.

Best Regards.
====================================

Take a careful look at your friends, neighbors, co-workers and family because SOMEONE is responding to these things!
 
Sean said:
The best one I got was a scammer attempting an Italian accent. He claimed he was a hitman and there is a contract out on my life that he must fulfill. However, he would give me the opportunity to pay more, and he would cancel the contract.
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That's a variation on the well known "Cuban Hitman" scam.
 
Probably one of those scams where he sends a cheque as payment, but, "Oops, I accidentally made the cheque out for too much, please transfer the difference directly into my account." Of course, once the victim's done this, the fraudulent cheque he received bounces a few days later.
 
That's the one that was mentioned a few posts ago and made me ask questions. Seemingly at least in the U.S. or Canadian banking system there appears to be very little in the way of an effective defence , short of not engaging with scammer at all or making the scammer wait weeks until the scammer's cheque has cleared( no chance of course) or finally the system reveals it to be fraudulent. Maybe the safest way is to return what is likely to be a fraudulent cheque to the sender, re-state the correct amount and say that you will wait until the cheque arrives with the correct amount on it. You could of course argue and with some justification that the minute an "overgenerous " cheque arrives you cease to trade but I just wondered how much protection the naively honest victim gets under whatever banking system he is covered by.

I have no idea how much protection the U.K. banking system gives in such cases.

pentaxuser
 

I get a few of these a week. My provider has a way for me to forward these to the provider who then blocks the senders and blocks the message from getting to any of their clients.
 
Sorry, my bad for not reading the whole thread.
 
Paul Manuell said:
Sorry, my bad for not reading the whole thread.
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No problem. It sparked some more thoughts from me about the whole matter of protection in the banking system. Not just for this kind of a scam but the whole matter of accepting cheques for items. If I remember rightly, the usual advice from consumer groups about accepting cheques for say your car was that a cheque which I think was called a "banker's draft" was OK because it was the equivalent of "coin of the realm". If you accepted an ordinary cheque then you parted with the goods after it had cleared which was usually 3 days but responses I received, admittedly from non U.K based respondents, suggested that this was not safe.

I think you are the first U.K. based member to have responded since I asked my questions. I really ought to ask my bank but I threw the questions out in case anyone from the U.K. had had any recent experience of what protection you have in the U.K. banking system

pentaxuser
 
pentaxuser said:
Maybe the safest way is to return what is likely to be a fraudulent cheque to the sender, re-state the correct amount and say that you will wait until the cheque arrives with the correct amount on it.
Click to expand...

Just don't touch it with bare fingers and send it and its envelope to the FBI, Scotland Yard, etc... - If you dig around, you can probably find out what investigative body is responsible in your area. It is NOT likely to be the local police. In the US, if they use the US Post Office to send a fraudulent check, it's more serious and the US Post Office has its own lab for such things.
 
Here in Brazil, cheques are moderately safe, but there’s still room for fraud.

When you give a cheque to anyone here, it’s considered as good as money. Though you can ask the bank to stop the cheque, you have to give a the bank a reason and even that can be disputed in court by the holder.

Also, our banking system, especially the system that handles bank-to-bank operations, is pretty fast. A cheque from another bank will be cleared (or stopped) the next business day after deposit. It’s pretty much electronic, but you can ask for verification, for example, in the case of forgery.

After the widespread use of debit and credit cards with chip and PIN, cheques are not as welcome as they once were.
 

The US Postal Inspectors is a good place to forward your complaints and checks to.
 
Sirius Glass said:
The US Postal Inspectors is a good place to forward your complaints and checks to.
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IF the scammers use the USMail - many (including the ones who've sent us checks) use FedEx or UPS because they don't fall under the same jurisdiction.
 
Sirius Glass said:
The US Postal Inspectors is a good place to forward your complaints and checks to.
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Yes, assuming they are using the US Mail. Copies of checks can go to the US Treasury Department.
 
Wallendo said:
It is amazing that few internet scammers are capable of writing proper English (or even that garbled version spoken in the UK ).
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There's a simple reason for that: it's the first stage filter on responses. They send those emails out to a huge number of people, only a minority of whom will be thick enough to fall for the scam. If they can limit the responses they need to handle to those from people who don't notice the atrocious language, they save a lot of extra work.
 

Yep
 
tih said:
There's a simple reason for that: it's the first stage filter on responses. ...
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That's clever. I wonder if that strategy just evolved or whether it was preconceived.
 
Theo Sulphate said:
That's clever. I wonder if that strategy just evolved or whether it was preconceived.
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It must because they have been doing it for over a decade. Books on infosec discuss the success of the strategy.
 
How about the ones from India claiming your in trouble with the IRS.
 
Louis Nargi said:
How about the ones from India claiming your in trouble with the IRS.
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Not long ago there was a documentary on TV about the IRS/ CRA scams from India showing how a large operation was taken down by the Indian police following pressure from the USA government to act on thousands of complaints. Actual phone operators were interviewed explaining how they conducted the scam and the instructions they received from their managers. Very interesting material that should be distributed across the Americas so less people fall for the scams.
 
Sirius Glass said:
As you know I do not have a website nor do I ever post on the internet, yet I received this fraud attempt:
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I get these emails a couple times a year. The last time I quoted $2500 for a 16x20 FB Print, with no mat or frame. I would send him an invoice to the email address used. I guaranteed him that it would double in value every year for 5 years, and if it didn't, I would buy it back!
 
There's the world wide web and that's fine. But how about a US web totally detached from the former, just for the sake of choice?
 
sissysphoto said:
There's the world wide web and that's fine. But how about a US web totally detached from the former, just for the sake of choice?
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Due to the way network addressing works, that's not practical.

I've long thought that U.S. Government/Military/Utility sites (or basically the infrastructure sites for any country) should have their own independent incompatible network from the rest of the (small-i) internet, with totally different protocols and their own proprietary operating systems (*). But what do I, a mere retired firmware engineer, know?

Even so, the U.S. is filled with its own scam artists.

(*) after Iran's nuclear program got clobbered by the diabolical Stuxnet attack, I think this independent/proprietary approach is what Iran has chosen for their military/nuclear programs: no Windows, no Linux, no Apple, maybe totally new IP scheme.
 
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