The Wedding That Wasn't, Part II

I received an email a few weeks ago from someone we'll call Mr. X, who was wondering if I was available in October to shoot a wedding. My first wedding shoot! I was elated, of course, though his next statement made an eyebrow go up: he said he was impressed with my business profile on Manta.com. In case you didn't know, Manta is a business rating site, kind of like Yelp or Angie's List. While I am technically listed on Manta.com, my profile basically says, "Seattle photographer," and lists our address and phone number. So Mr. X is apparently easily impressed, but I shrugged and said, "Whatever."

After a few more emails in which I learned very little about the specifics of the wedding, I sent him my price sheet with my current package deals. Didn't hesitate, just said that his uncle would be paying my fee via cashier's check or money order. I said, "Money's money, so I'm not going to worry about it until the check actually arrives." Mr. X emailed a couple of days later, saying that his BROTHER had sent the check via courier, but had accidentally added my price AND the payment to their wedding planner in one check, so could I please write a check or money order and send it to the address they would specify later.

If you're not screaming, "Don't do it!" as loudly as I do when I watch a young girl about to investigate a strange noise in the basement in a horror movie, you should be. This is a fairly common form of Internet scam, known as an Advance Payment Fraud. I'd heard of it happening to people on eBay and Craigslist, where someone will win/buy an item, then "accidentally" overpay for the item and ask the seller to just send a Western Union moneygram for the amount overpaid. With cashier's checks and money orders, because they're issued by a bank or financial institution, your bank will accept them and make the funds available to you within a day or two, but the check itself has to be mailed back to the originating bank before someone will realize it's bogus, sometimes as much as ten days later. By that time, you've already sent the check to the buyer for the difference, and you've already shipped whatever item they had bought off you. So now, you're out the money you just wired, you have to pay back to your bank the price of the item you just sold, you're also out the item you were selling, and more than likely, your bank is already in the process of prosecuting you for fraud for trying to deposit a bogus check (because as far as they know, there is no buyer, and you're just trying to scam the bank).

At this point, lots of alarm bells were going off in my head, as they should have, but there was still a tiny iota of optimism that said, "Well, what if this is legitimate? What if I'm just dealing with the most disorganized, uncommunicative person who speaks English as a second language, and whose family comes from a country in which it's legal for her brother to marry her widowed aunt, making him her brother/uncle, who is wealthy and willing to pay for her wedding expenses out of the goodness of his heart, but isn't terribly organized himself (it's genetic, I tell you) and goes to the trouble of actually adding all the expenses up and writing a single check for it all and sending it to me? *pant*pant*pant* I wouldn't want to yell at them and call them frauds if they were legitimate, because I don't want to scare away potential clients."

Two things: If you read my previous post, you know my #1 rule for Internet financial security: if it feels like a scam, it's probably a scam. And secondly, as many business educators will tell you, if they are not your ideal client, don't be heartbroken if you have to cut them loose. You should focus 80% of your energy in attracting the people who fit the profile of your ideal client, in terms of income and budget, temperament, and the kinds of products and services they expect out of you. If you're spending 80% of your energy trying to please the 20% of your total clientele who are demanding, cheap or penny-pinching, overly critical fussbudgets who are looking to get more than they're due for the amount of money they're paying you, then you're doing something wrong. So even if they are legitimate, the minute they start making life difficult for you, you should be willing to say, "I'm sorry, but I'm afraid I just can't work with you," and walk away. Be polite, but be firm.

However, since part of me was amused with this little game, I didn't say anything, and waited for the check to arrive. It was sent via FedEx and arrived this past Wednesday afternoon, and it kind of made me angry in a way, because these people aren't even trying to fool me. If I got burned by someone with a really clever con, sure, I'd be mad, but I'd have to nod and say, "Okay, that was good. I never saw that one coming."

These fools? Mailed a check from Georgia for someone who claimed to be currently living in Texas, in payment for a wedding that will be occurring here in Seattle, and I was supposed to wire half the amount to a purported wedding planner in.... West Padukah, Kentucky? Oh yes, and the name on the bank account from which the check was supposedly drawn? Colorado State University. Really? Did they think I wouldn't notice that someone on the Board of Regents for CSU was supposedly writing a check for their sister/niece's wedding expenses? And Kentucky? If you're planning on moving from Texas to Washington and are going to have your wedding up here in the Seattle area, presumably after you're moved and gotten all settled in, why in the name of all that's holy would you hire a wedding planner in Kentucky?? "Yes, ma'am, if you could just contact florists, churches, musicians, caterers, decorators, and bakeries you don't know in a state you may or may not have ever visited in your life? That'd be great."

So to sum up:

1. Cold-contacted me via email, saying my virtually non-existent Manta.com profile was impressive, and wanted to hire me to do wedding photos
2. Won't tell me where the wedding will be, so I can contact the venue and make sure photographers are allowed (some churches actually don't allow photographers in their weddings... never really understood why not)
3. Is a little confused over which relative will be paying for my expenses, which is really something you should know ahead of time.
4. Sends me the wrong amount of money, and asks me to just forward the difference to somebody after I cash the check.
5. Tells me to send the excess money to someone whom it doesn't make sense would be involved in this wedding.
6. Writes the check from an account that has absolutely no business sending funds for a wedding. (Called the bank, and the account exists, but the check didn't mention the Board of Regents, just Colorado State, so we all agreed it was probably bogus)
7. Has suspiciously bad English writing skills, which isn't necessarily an indication of wrongdoing by itself, but taken in conjunction with the rest, tells me they're a foreign national scamming Americans.

Sadly, they have my name and address, so I can't counter-scam them too much, or someone might actually show up at my door one day. Instead, I found the website for the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), which is a joint operation between the FBI and the National White Collar Crime Center, and filed a complaint. It's usually meant for people who have already lost money to a con to report the crime and hopefully help catch these people and maybe get a bit of their money back, but I figured, hey, crime in progress here, people; maybe if you jump on this, you'll catch a scammer in the act of scamming someone. I'll let you know if I hear of any action, but I thought I would relate my tale to you, dear friends, that you might learn from my experience and gain much needed paranoia when dealing with the faceless horde that is the Internet. For those of us who run small businesses, con artists like this waste our time and energy, and if you are approached by one, run away! I kept going with this one probably about three weeks longer than I really should have, but part of me hoped they would prove to be legitimate, because I really, REALLY wanted to shoot a wedding. *sigh* I wish these people would go away, or at least leave me alone, but since they're not, it behooves us all to be on the alert for them. There, you have been warned.

The Wedding That Wasn't, Part I

Since you're reading this, I know you have Internet access. Therefore, I know you have received at least one phishing email from someone trying to scam you out of hundreds or even thousands of dollars, and a few of you have even fallen for some of these con games. The Internet is like a sea full of hungry sharks, and as soon as you indicate weakness, some indication that you are even the slightest bit greedy or gullible -- preferrably both -- it's like blood in the water. If all the spam I've received offering me money were real, I would be a multi-billionaire by now.

As a public service, therefore, here are a few rules to keep in mind if you are contacted by someone offering you money.

1) No one wants to give you money, so 99.9% chance it's a scam. Period. People don't offer you money out of the blue. Even if you're entitled to some money, the people holding it will make it as difficult as possible to collect, because maybe they can use the money to make more money through investments and such; it behooves them to delay paying you as long as possible

2) If you didn't buy a lottery ticket, YOU DIDN'T WIN THE LOTTERY. Especially if it's a lottery you've never heard of, in a country you've never visited. See rule #1

3) If you don't know the person or anyone mentioned in their message, they are not a relative, and even if they are, they aren't going to give you money (if you're that distant a relation that you don't know who they are, why would they leave you money in their will?) See rule #1.

4) No one "selects your email at random" to win money. See Rule #1.

5) If someone wants to smuggle money out of a foreign country because they have come by it by illegitimate means, they're not going to choose YOU to move it. You are not the A-Team. You are not Billy Ocean or any of his associates. Unless you have diplomatic immunity, own a container ship or a reliable submarine, or have ties to banks in the Caiman Islands, you do not have the wherewithal to smuggle large sums of cash (you do know they trace wire transfers for security purposes, right? The sudden appearance of $20 million in the bank account of a school teacher or a cabinet maker is going to raise a few eyebrows.) In any case, even if it was true (which it isn't), secretly transferring large sums of money without declaring it or paying taxes on it is illegal, and not only could YOU lose money, but you could also go to jail for being complicit to a fraud.

6) Learning grammar, syntax and spelling really pays. Even uneducated Americans can speak and write English well enough to be understood and sound American, and while spelling is sometimes a weak point for many people, even middle-school dropouts will know enough to place verbs and nouns in the correct order. Oftentimes, however, since many of the Internet scammers are foreign-born, their grasp of English is usually not so hot. It might not be a fair measure of potential clients or long-lost relatives or legitimate legal entities who are seeking you out to give you money for something, to base your decision to give them access to your money solely on bad grammar or a really thick accent, it's unfortunately still a good practice to distrust anyone who claims to be an American but sounds like the instruction manual for an imported electronic device. ("Please to be sending a checque soonish for very fast processing your happy monies...")

7) No one, and I mean NO ONE accidentally pays $1000 extra for something they bought on the Internet, requiring the seller to send them money back. People can be stupid, but people are pretty tight with their cash, and don't want to spend more than they actually owe. See rule #1!! This leads into today's lesson; please continue reading Part II.