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Steer clear definately a scam! If wiring money is involved somehow it's never good!!
My wife was sent a counterfeit cashiers check once for collectables she had listed on ebay that the person had requested to buy outside of the eBay sale since she was from Nigeria and had plenty of money but needed a friend to help her ship the goods back to her and just wanted to send us a "proper" cashiers check so we would not worry about it being legitimate. She had emailed my wife quite a few times so we went along to see what would happen but we never gave more than an email address.
Extra money was given to cover shipping $1000 and she wanted to have my wife deposit the check ($4800) and then wire the extra money to a friend of hers that was going to set up shipping the goods back to the buyer.
We went to the bank with the check to see what they said and found out the check was a very good counterfeit, one of the best they had ever seen. What they said would happen was if we deposited the check in our account and then wired the extra funds, we would lose that extra money. The scammer would hope no one would catch the counterfeit check at the time of deposit, and then when we wired the extra money we would be liable for that amount we sent back ($1000) because the initial cashiers check was bad, once it was discovered the check was fake we would have no recourse because the money would have been wired out of the country and the bank would ultimately come after us to protect their assets.
The bank took the check to give to the authorities and we also turned over the email address of the scammer too. Never heard anything.
I told my wife from the very beginning the whole deal smelled like a big turd so we played along to see what would happen and were careful to never give any other info besides a basic email to them.
Be careful, there are many crazy people out there that think of all kinds of ways to try to steal money from innocent people!
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