I received email fraud from a yahoo account?

3 Comments

1. Buffy Staffordshire says:

   March 7, 2012 at 6:54 pm

   100% scam, you are correct.

   There is no renter.

   There is only a scammer trying to steal your hard-earned money with a fake check and a fake story of being out of town/state/country and moving into your area.

   The next email will be from another of the scammer’s fake names and free email addresses pretending to be the “secretary/assistant/accountant” and will demand you cash a large fake check sent on a stolen UPS/FedEx billing account number and send the money via Western Union or moneygram back to the scammer posing as the “shipping/travel company”. When your bank realizes the check is fake and it bounces, you get the real life job of paying back the bank for the bounced check fees and all the bank’s money you sent to an overseas criminal.

   Western Union and moneygram do not verify anything on the form the sender fills out, not the name, not the street address, not the country, not even the gender of the receiver, it all means absolutely nothing. The clerk will not bother to check ID and will simply hand off your cash to whomever walks in the door with the MTCN# and question/answer. Neither company will tell the sender who picked up the cash, at what store location or even in what country your money walked out the door. Neither company has any kind of refund policy, money sent is money gone forever.

   Now that you have responded to a scammer, you are on his ‘potential sucker’ list, he will try again to separate you from your cash. He will send you more emails from his other free email addresses using another of his fake names with all kinds of stories of great places to rent, lottery winnings, millions in the bank and desperate, lonely, sexy singles. He will sell your email address to all his scamming buddies who will also send you dozens of fake emails all with the exact same goal, you sending them your cash via Western Union or moneygram.

   You could post up the email address and the emails themselves that the scammer is using, it will help make your post more googlable for other suspicious potential victims to find when looking for information.

   Do you know how to check the header of a received email? If not, you could google for information. Being able to read the header to determine the geographic location an email originated from will help you weed out the most obvious scams and scammers. Then delete and block that scammer. Don’t bother to tell him that you know he is a scammer, it isn’t worth your effort. He has one job in life, convincing victims to send him their hard-earned cash.

   Whenever suspicious or just plain curious, google everything, website addresses, names used, companies mentioned, phone numbers given, all email addresses, even sentences from the emails as you might be unpleasantly surprised at what you find already posted online. You can also post/ask here and every scam-warner-anti-fraud-busting site you can find before taking a chance and losing money to a scammer.

   If you google “fake apartment renter”, “fraud Western Union house rent scam” or something similar you will find hundreds of posts from victims and near-victims of this type of scam

   Thanks for posting up the information on that scammer.

   Making a scammer’s scam googlable on every scam-warner-anti-fraud-busting site you can find is a great way to slow that scammer down when a suspicious potential victim goes looking for information, finds your post containing the name the scammer is using, his email address, phone number and the emails themselves and then that potential victim does not become a scam victim because you took the time “get the word out”.

   Thanks!!

   Wasting a scammer’s time legally and safely is called “scambaiting”. If you google that word, you will find sites where you can read scambaits, post up the emails and email addresses of scammers, post up a fake website, read up on how to alert a hosting company that they are hosting a fake website, ask questions and learn all about the hobby of scambaiting.
2. Kit says:

   March 7, 2012 at 7:45 pm

   The first thing to do is print out copies of all emails and bring them to your local police station with the travelers checks and envelope they were mailed in. These are stolen checks

   Then fill out a Yahoo Mail Abuse form to report the sender http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/ymail/abuse.html
3. Clare says:

   March 7, 2012 at 8:09 pm

   This is bogus. We had the same rubbish from the same email address. Asking about our holiday cottage. Luckily we realised in time! Beware of scammers!