New York – Those scams where people receive realistic looking checks in the mail and they are told if they cash them and mail back a service or tax fee of as much as several thousand dollars, they will be entitled to a virtual gold mine of cash, appear to be more prevalent in recent days.
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The State Attorney General’s Office is alerting people to the rip-offs noting that if they do deposit a check that bounces, they are liable to their bank to make good on it.
Most of the scams are conducted from Canada with some overseas. If you should receive one of those letters with the offer that sounds too good to be true, don’t cash the check. Call the Attorney General’s Office, said Mark Hoops, a senior consumer frauds representative.
“The Attorney General has a toll-free help line – 800-771-7755,” he said. “We will be happy to accept these scams because the postal inspectors maintain a foreign frauds desk and every so often they are able to go get the bad guys. Only education will defeat this scam, though, because it’s all over the place.”
Hoops said fake check scams can cost a victim an average of $4,000.
Scams like this are a violation of federal law if you participate in a foreign based contest or lottery, and they can also fund international terrorism, he said.
come on!
who is going to believe something like this?
Anyone who sends a check to such scam artists deserves to lose what they send. I’ve been watching the news each night where they have one yiddeshe couple after another whining that the goverment should give them back all the money they lost with Madoff the genaff. I have the same reaction; anyone who takes all their millions of dollars and gives 100 percent of it to one person to invest (regardless of their reputation) is either meshuge, irresponsible or both. The government has not more obligation to the Madoff “victims” then it does to compensate me for the money I’ve lost over the past few months to the stock market meltdown caused by all the bad mortgage loans and derivative products that the government also should have been regulating.
This is as far fetched as the Emails that I get from a Nigerian giving me a chance to claim the fortune of a man who died in a plane crash leaving no one else besides me to claim the money. There must be a lot of stupid people out there or the scammers would take to time to develop these schemes. Of course we realize that the readers of this blog would never fall for any of these.
There is an even worse that targets goyish charities (but could be used against mosdos as well) A large check $500 -$1000 comes in from yuhupitzville from someone or a foundation you never heard of. The charity deposits the check and it clears. The cancelled check with the account number and routing number of the charity’s bank account is returned to the senders account. The sender prints check with that routing number and buys stuff and cashes them all over creartion. until the charity’s statement comes, or other checks start to bounce, the phenomenon could countinue for a month. Beware of greeks bearing gifts.
A more dangerous scam involves you getting a “rebate” check of a very small amount, as low as a dollar or so.
Since it’s so small (and nobody asks you to send them back anything) you figure it can’t hurt to deposit it. And it does clear, without any problems.
When you deposit a check:
1. your bank encodes (on the back) the account number and routing number of the person to whom it was deposited (you).
2. if you endorse it, then your signature is also on the back of the check.
Thus, the scam artist who sent you the (real) check now has confirmation of your name and address (since you received and deposited the check they sent) and also your routing number and bank account details and even your legal signature (since the scammers get a copy of their cashed check).
They then can either
* commit full-blown identity theft of you,
* withdraw funds directly from your account,
or (more easily)
* simply print checks with your name, address and the properly encoded bank account information, signature which they can copy from your endorsement, and then write checks (made out to “cash” or a ficticious name which they have) from your account.
If you are not expecting a check from someone, throw it away.
If you are not sure, and it is very small (a couple of dollars), play safe and just toss it away.
BEDIDI HAVA IVDEH
I had a vehicle to sell, put ad on the internet, got an email from buyer. We settled for the price, and”it” stated that it will send a check for double the amount to pay to ship the vehicle to owners location. sure enough I got an official looking bank check, from a bank in LA. I was suspicious because the car was to ship to WA. Sure enough the check was fake fraud.
I then traced the emails from buyer it was from nigeria