Okay, so now for something completely serious- Got a special delivery letter (by a bonafide delivery service, I should add, who required my signature for delivery). The day of the delivery, I got a phone call at home from a woman who identified herself as being from "Zagat" and explaining that I had been chosen to help them in a marketing survey and would be compensated for my time.
Long story short, the package included a cashier's check in the amount of $3,875.00 and made out to me. I was being instructed to cash the check, take out $500 for my trouble and then go to a Money Gram location and, posing as a customer, wire the remainder of the money to an address in Canada, thus giving me the opportunity to evaluate the business...
Okay, so I didn't fall for it because I'm from New York and because I'm naturally cynical and because I knew nobody was going to blindly mail out a check for $3,875 and assume they'd get most of it back.
Did some on line checking (well, by Bob- I was too busy notifying Zagat that they're being misrepresented) led to the National Consumers League website (nclnet.org) which says fake check scams with wire transfers are the number one telemarketing fraud and 3rd on the list of internet-based scams.
I don't know how they got my name, home address and phone number (and am none to pleased about that) but I do know that the one thing all these scams seem to have in common seems to be a lack of mastering the English language.
We have seen this when we've looked closely at the emails notifying us that 'your ebay/PayPal, bank account has been suspended and again, in this case, it held true.
So how do you protect yourself? Do some research to see what's out there, keep your antenna up, look for grammatical errors, but mostly remember the age old adage 'if it seems to good to be true, it is".
Check out: www.nclnet.org/fraud
And good luck.
Long story short, the package included a cashier's check in the amount of $3,875.00 and made out to me. I was being instructed to cash the check, take out $500 for my trouble and then go to a Money Gram location and, posing as a customer, wire the remainder of the money to an address in Canada, thus giving me the opportunity to evaluate the business...
Okay, so I didn't fall for it because I'm from New York and because I'm naturally cynical and because I knew nobody was going to blindly mail out a check for $3,875 and assume they'd get most of it back.
Did some on line checking (well, by Bob- I was too busy notifying Zagat that they're being misrepresented) led to the National Consumers League website (nclnet.org) which says fake check scams with wire transfers are the number one telemarketing fraud and 3rd on the list of internet-based scams.
I don't know how they got my name, home address and phone number (and am none to pleased about that) but I do know that the one thing all these scams seem to have in common seems to be a lack of mastering the English language.
We have seen this when we've looked closely at the emails notifying us that 'your ebay/PayPal, bank account has been suspended and again, in this case, it held true.
So how do you protect yourself? Do some research to see what's out there, keep your antenna up, look for grammatical errors, but mostly remember the age old adage 'if it seems to good to be true, it is".
Check out: www.nclnet.org/fraud
And good luck.
No comments:
Post a Comment