Watch out for scams over the internet especially on this holiday season. A church from Austin, Texas is way familiar with the types of scams from the Craigslist site. It had been over 6 months now that they have heard of somebody sending out some fake checks that appear as checks from their church. The checks are for amounts that are much higher than what the item is said to be worth. That way the seller would have to send back to the extra amount to the buyer by cash. Unfortunately they will eventually find out that the check was actually fake and so they got scammed of real money.
It is quite unfortunate that churches like the church in Austin are being attacked by this fraudulent activity said one of the accountants of the church. 40/29 had taken the checks to a bank to see if it will pass and the bank employee said the ink quality of the said checks concerned her. The paper does not even have security features. If a fake check has been issued, the person who wishes to withdraw the money will be held responsible for the money by the bank once the check has been proven to be fake.
Craigslist is a popular site that makes it easier for people to advertise their goods and/or services. But, whenever you deal with someone through a transaction and you never see their faces, you got to be on your toes and check for red flags in all your transactions.
One woman from Lawrenceville posted an ad on Craigslist for apartments for rent and in one day, she got dozens of responses. She also received checks for amounts higher than the actual price and she receives an email asking her to wire transfer the difference. This is a big red flag and this type of scam is already overused and still, some people get scammed over and over again.
Everybody should be warned about this and they should check the authenticity of the checks that they receive. Whenever someone sends you a check with amount higher than your price and asks you to send back the over amount via wire transfer, you should avoid it.
Craigslist users should be aware of the different types of techniques used by scammers to get some money out of you. There’s one style that scammers use nowadays that must alarm you because it looks too good to be true. What technique is this? Counterfeit checks.
What the scammer would do is they will look around for ads on Craigslist then they will contact the seller regarding the ad. For example, if you are selling your computer for let’s say, $600, they will tell you that they want to buy it from you and they’ll just send you a cashier’s check. When you receive the check, you see that it’s not worth $600 at all but something more like, let’s say, $1000. Then the scammer would then tell you that they overpaid and would wish for you to send him the extra $400 through wire transfer and by the time you do that, he would instantly receive his money while you wait days for the check to be cleared and you now know what’s going to happen. The check would turn out to be a counterfeit and the bank would be running after you for the money. The worst case scenario here is if you already gave him the goods, gave him the extra money he was asking then the check turned out to be a counterfeit.
This turns out to have gotten many victims but if you can already detect all the warning signs then you can save yourself with such losses.
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