Mellows
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International Frauds made simple, A revised guide for eBayers.
Let me briefly outline some of the most common international fraud methods.
These are usually aimed at new sellers in the hope of catching them with their innocence intact. Do not fall for these scams. People do fall for them or the scammers would not bother.
First of all, anything involving Nigeria is overwhelmingly likely to be fraudulent.(apart from one user )
1/ The Western Union Bidpay scam.
The fraudster hopes that the seller will send the item before the MO payment arrives after the seller receives a fake announcement from Bidpay that the order is approved.
The initial approach is usually a request to send to a relative/associate in Nigeria. It so often starts "How are you and your family? " as if they cared.
This works because people, including myself, routinely send the item on confirmation from Bidpay. Remember the scammers' e-mails always say 'send the item' the real ones say you can send the item if you want, and are free from grammatical errors and mis-spellings.
Login to http://www.bidpay.com to check if an order is really coming.
It is easily guarded against by checking your Bidpay account before shipping.
2/ The overpaid check scam.
This is a forged cheque/check,(money order, cashiers cheque,bank draft) usually drawn on London by an overseas bank so it will clear in the UK. When it gets back to the issuing bank they spot the forgery, and the money is reclaimed.
As far as you know at first, the cheque has cleared, and few know that cleared cheques can still 'bounce' later. Any of this 'surplus' that you have sent to the scammer in the meantime is lost. As are any goods sent, but the goal of the scam is the cash 'overpayment' not the goods, which may be directed to a nonexistent address. The money can be collected from any WU office in the world, and in many parts of the world the ID checks are a laugh, 5 Wongas to the clerk and he is anybody's.
3/ The routine non-existent article scam.
Often free shipping is offered, why not, there is nothing to ship.
The payment is requested by WU cash transfer, a very different animal from WU Bidpay, and this form of transfer can be claimed from anywhere, with nothing but the 10 digit code, in places like Romania.
Typically the seller has zero FB and is registered in a different country from the one they claim to be selling from, and a completed item search may throw up the real sale they have copied and pasted to make their advert. If the seller does have what appears to be good FB, on inspection it is for some totally unrelated sales or purchases from a different location, as the account is a hijacked one.
If it seems too good to be true it almost certainly is
A refinement on both the fake buying and the fake selling scams is the use of a fake 'Escrow' site.
Any suggestion of using an escrow site other than http://www.escrow.com
or in the UK, http://www.auctionpix.co.uk/ is
a sure sign of fraudulent intent. An internet 'whois' search will usually reveal the domain name to be a new registration. 'Forward'(to include headers) any e-mails from scammers with fake escrow site names to [email protected] to get them closed down.
The scam escrow sites are often linked in name only to well known Freight/Courier companies, (TNTEscrow) but no real companies do this sort of service.
A variation on this is the eBay/Square Trade guarantee. In this one, the scammers send spoof e-mails that appear to come from eBay's Safe Harbor, or Square Trade, saying that the fraudster has a large deposit with ebay to secure your sending the item to them (or buying from them, it is reversible). This is an immediate No-No, as no such service exists.
4/ The Poisoned Paypal Purchase Scam
This one uses a stolen or cloned credit card to fund a purchase by paypal, often with a hijacked paypal account. The warning signs here are a request to send the item to some Eastern European or African location as a 'present' or whatever, and a mismatch of names/CC account names/paypal account names/etc, explained by various excuses. A simpler but more risky approach is to simply fund a paypal purchase with a stolen CC, but to have the item sent to the 'buyers' address.
This will be a maildrop somewhere, an accommodation address, but there is a certain amount of risk to this as someone will have to pick up the item, and a policeman could be waiting for them (don't laugh, it could happen).
I would be inclined to delay sending out any expensive paypal purchase for a new or newish ebay for a few days. An e-mail explaining this should placate genuine buyers, a note in your listing to this effect may in fact deter the fraudster from targeting you in the first place.
5/ The Indonesian Chargeback Scam
This one is less common nowadays, and was always more common on ebay.com
If you are selling an expensive item you will get an approach to buy it at a silly high price to be paid by credit card. Shipping by FedEx or UPS, as fast as possible (naturally) The card may be stolen or cloned, but the real Indonesian twist was that the card could be quite legitimate, but the 'buyer' would claim non-delivery and charge back the amount through their card issuer. This worked because the local banks simply did not do any investigation of chargebacks but granted all of them automatically!
Lastly, there is
6/ The 'help us with Paypal' Scam.
This one is in the form of an e-mail saying "Can you help with a paypal account" so they can take customers PP payments, they will give you 10% or more for no effort on your part. They say they will make Paypal transfers of funds into your account, you withdraw the cash and send it to them by WU money transfer.
This is simply a way of using and draining Paypal accounts they
have hijacked with spoof e-mails. The money will be traced to you and you are the patsy, the thieves are away with the cash.
These are just five common scams,(there are more) and are quite distinct, some people seem to have
them muddled. This would be harmless if they did not post their muddled ideas. None of these have anything to do with money laundering.
In all cases,please report the ebay ID for false contact info. It always is. If they have bought from you or 'sold' to you and you do not intend to play cat and mouse with them, give negative FB to warn others.
You can select to block most scam bidders in 'My ebay, selling preferences', select 'block bidders from countries I do not ship to', and 'block net negative bidders'.
Never send goods or money.
I recommend playing with the scammers, to wind them up a bit. Just play along,
pretend to be fooled, and give the address of your local police station, say, to 'P.C Copper' there. That is for the check/cheque ones. Or get the cheque for yourself and frame it. Or e-mail them to say, "Thanks, you are going to keep all of it", and see what they say. You know there is no money, they know there is no money, but they do not know you know there is no money, and it would be interesting to see how they would react.
For the Bidpay ones, just agree, and imagine the sad little faces when nothing turns up. Or send a lump of something unpleasant.
For the non-existent item, send a random collection of 10 digits, (the format of a WU money transfer number) and see how long you can continue doing this with slight differences till they catch on. Transposing 2 digits and sending again is believable. Claim 'numeric dyslexia'.
Never worry about FB, scammers do not do it. They really do not care. They have to be registered for 5 days now to give a negative and they do not usually last that long anyway.
Never worry about them turning up on your doorstep. If they could get out of Nigeria, Romania, Ukraine or where-ever they would have other things to do.
I have not covered the various little cheating tricks that also occur on ebay, just the bigger money international scams, as I see a lot of confusion about the workings of these, and as a word of reassurance, most people can do a lifetime of ebaying without getting a sight of these fraudsters.
For further amusing reading try The 419 Eater site.
http://www.ebolamonkeyman.com
Let me briefly outline some of the most common international fraud methods.
These are usually aimed at new sellers in the hope of catching them with their innocence intact. Do not fall for these scams. People do fall for them or the scammers would not bother.
First of all, anything involving Nigeria is overwhelmingly likely to be fraudulent.(apart from one user )
1/ The Western Union Bidpay scam.
The fraudster hopes that the seller will send the item before the MO payment arrives after the seller receives a fake announcement from Bidpay that the order is approved.
The initial approach is usually a request to send to a relative/associate in Nigeria. It so often starts "How are you and your family? " as if they cared.
This works because people, including myself, routinely send the item on confirmation from Bidpay. Remember the scammers' e-mails always say 'send the item' the real ones say you can send the item if you want, and are free from grammatical errors and mis-spellings.
Login to http://www.bidpay.com to check if an order is really coming.
It is easily guarded against by checking your Bidpay account before shipping.
2/ The overpaid check scam.
This is a forged cheque/check,(money order, cashiers cheque,bank draft) usually drawn on London by an overseas bank so it will clear in the UK. When it gets back to the issuing bank they spot the forgery, and the money is reclaimed.
As far as you know at first, the cheque has cleared, and few know that cleared cheques can still 'bounce' later. Any of this 'surplus' that you have sent to the scammer in the meantime is lost. As are any goods sent, but the goal of the scam is the cash 'overpayment' not the goods, which may be directed to a nonexistent address. The money can be collected from any WU office in the world, and in many parts of the world the ID checks are a laugh, 5 Wongas to the clerk and he is anybody's.
3/ The routine non-existent article scam.
Often free shipping is offered, why not, there is nothing to ship.
The payment is requested by WU cash transfer, a very different animal from WU Bidpay, and this form of transfer can be claimed from anywhere, with nothing but the 10 digit code, in places like Romania.
Typically the seller has zero FB and is registered in a different country from the one they claim to be selling from, and a completed item search may throw up the real sale they have copied and pasted to make their advert. If the seller does have what appears to be good FB, on inspection it is for some totally unrelated sales or purchases from a different location, as the account is a hijacked one.
If it seems too good to be true it almost certainly is
A refinement on both the fake buying and the fake selling scams is the use of a fake 'Escrow' site.
Any suggestion of using an escrow site other than http://www.escrow.com
or in the UK, http://www.auctionpix.co.uk/ is
a sure sign of fraudulent intent. An internet 'whois' search will usually reveal the domain name to be a new registration. 'Forward'(to include headers) any e-mails from scammers with fake escrow site names to [email protected] to get them closed down.
The scam escrow sites are often linked in name only to well known Freight/Courier companies, (TNTEscrow) but no real companies do this sort of service.
A variation on this is the eBay/Square Trade guarantee. In this one, the scammers send spoof e-mails that appear to come from eBay's Safe Harbor, or Square Trade, saying that the fraudster has a large deposit with ebay to secure your sending the item to them (or buying from them, it is reversible). This is an immediate No-No, as no such service exists.
4/ The Poisoned Paypal Purchase Scam
This one uses a stolen or cloned credit card to fund a purchase by paypal, often with a hijacked paypal account. The warning signs here are a request to send the item to some Eastern European or African location as a 'present' or whatever, and a mismatch of names/CC account names/paypal account names/etc, explained by various excuses. A simpler but more risky approach is to simply fund a paypal purchase with a stolen CC, but to have the item sent to the 'buyers' address.
This will be a maildrop somewhere, an accommodation address, but there is a certain amount of risk to this as someone will have to pick up the item, and a policeman could be waiting for them (don't laugh, it could happen).
I would be inclined to delay sending out any expensive paypal purchase for a new or newish ebay for a few days. An e-mail explaining this should placate genuine buyers, a note in your listing to this effect may in fact deter the fraudster from targeting you in the first place.
5/ The Indonesian Chargeback Scam
This one is less common nowadays, and was always more common on ebay.com
If you are selling an expensive item you will get an approach to buy it at a silly high price to be paid by credit card. Shipping by FedEx or UPS, as fast as possible (naturally) The card may be stolen or cloned, but the real Indonesian twist was that the card could be quite legitimate, but the 'buyer' would claim non-delivery and charge back the amount through their card issuer. This worked because the local banks simply did not do any investigation of chargebacks but granted all of them automatically!
Lastly, there is
6/ The 'help us with Paypal' Scam.
This one is in the form of an e-mail saying "Can you help with a paypal account" so they can take customers PP payments, they will give you 10% or more for no effort on your part. They say they will make Paypal transfers of funds into your account, you withdraw the cash and send it to them by WU money transfer.
This is simply a way of using and draining Paypal accounts they
have hijacked with spoof e-mails. The money will be traced to you and you are the patsy, the thieves are away with the cash.
These are just five common scams,(there are more) and are quite distinct, some people seem to have
them muddled. This would be harmless if they did not post their muddled ideas. None of these have anything to do with money laundering.
In all cases,please report the ebay ID for false contact info. It always is. If they have bought from you or 'sold' to you and you do not intend to play cat and mouse with them, give negative FB to warn others.
You can select to block most scam bidders in 'My ebay, selling preferences', select 'block bidders from countries I do not ship to', and 'block net negative bidders'.
Never send goods or money.
I recommend playing with the scammers, to wind them up a bit. Just play along,
pretend to be fooled, and give the address of your local police station, say, to 'P.C Copper' there. That is for the check/cheque ones. Or get the cheque for yourself and frame it. Or e-mail them to say, "Thanks, you are going to keep all of it", and see what they say. You know there is no money, they know there is no money, but they do not know you know there is no money, and it would be interesting to see how they would react.
For the Bidpay ones, just agree, and imagine the sad little faces when nothing turns up. Or send a lump of something unpleasant.
For the non-existent item, send a random collection of 10 digits, (the format of a WU money transfer number) and see how long you can continue doing this with slight differences till they catch on. Transposing 2 digits and sending again is believable. Claim 'numeric dyslexia'.
Never worry about FB, scammers do not do it. They really do not care. They have to be registered for 5 days now to give a negative and they do not usually last that long anyway.
Never worry about them turning up on your doorstep. If they could get out of Nigeria, Romania, Ukraine or where-ever they would have other things to do.
I have not covered the various little cheating tricks that also occur on ebay, just the bigger money international scams, as I see a lot of confusion about the workings of these, and as a word of reassurance, most people can do a lifetime of ebaying without getting a sight of these fraudsters.
For further amusing reading try The 419 Eater site.
http://www.ebolamonkeyman.com
