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Not long ago, authorities were trying to create consciousness about a scam / fraud being committed on the Internet through websites that publish classifieds. Most of the times, these frauds were committed on classifieds on the Automobile sections. When an user post and ad of an auto for sale, he or she could be contacted by an individual that supposedly live in the United States and is very interested in the auto that he or she has for sale.

This supposed buyer, identifies himself as a business man that travels a lot and because of that, he would buy the car even without seeing it. Could you imagine? Who in this world buy car without even seeing it? Incredible as it sounds, this guys are clever enough to "drib" the ball in a way that many people ended up believing his story.

At the end, the negotiation turns to the guy sending a false check, Money Order, or any other bank document for extra money, telling then, that it was a mistake of his "varister" and asking you to be so kind to send him back the over payment. Of course, this over payment is his real profit for this scam. If the car is on sale for $1500, as in a case with one of our customers, he would send false checks for $3000, so you return $1500 to him. The word "varister" was the first evidence that this guy is not from USA. We had to look up that word in a dictionary, turning out to be some type of lawyer.

Well, the majority of these cases were perpetrated from Nigeria, Africa, but as a recent attempt, it has moved to Mali (not really far away). In the mentioned case with my customer, the guy sent 3 Money Gram checks for $1000 each and wanted the over payment of $1500 sent to him in a Money Gram check. All the time, he was sending emails from USA servers and he even made 3 phone calls from USA unknown numbers, may be using VOIP services, as many of these services offer free calls from many Countries worldwide, like InternetCalls.com for example. The registered phone numbers were unknown anyway, as it happens with those Companies. Also, the Money Gram checks came from an USA address through UPS. I guess they have some partners here in the USA, who help them with the scam, though the address was a fake one, as it belongs to a School. I guess that services like UPS won't allow to use false return addresses, like putting Arizona as a return address and dropping it at New York. At least that is the case of the USPS, so I guess UPS has the same rules. Otherwise, it could also be an inside job of someone working UPS, helping the guy in Mali.

The real address is unveiled at the end when he tells to kindly send the over payment to his "varister" address on Mali. The name used could be a false one, but certainly, the address given is real, as there is where they will receive the money if somebody bites the bait.

One thin he does, is sending a tracking pixel, which is an invisible picture in his emails that will let him know when the email was opened and from what IP address, without consent or knowledge from the user. There are free Internet services for this already.

In this case, the falseness of the checks he sent was obvious as the frame was printed in an angle other than 90 degrees and the paper was of a very bad quality. You could notice the smell of printer ink on them. But the most solid evidence of invalidity, was of course the micro print on them. You should always check that feature on money orders for validity if you are in doubt. The micro print, is a very small print of some words somewhere in the check (in the amount frame in this case) that no printer, fax or photocopier can reproduce. Instead of reproducing clear characters when looking under powerful magnifying glass, the characters will look blurry and could not be read. Instructions for this are always printed on the back of such documents.

In an attempt to discourage this dishonest practice, and to help others from becoming victims of such kind of fraud, we will be publishing below the details of this fraud attempt. Again, the name of the guy might be bogus, but the address must be real, as he was expecting money to arrive there.

At the end, we gave part of this to local FBI authorities, but we know that it is not much that can be done for now. The best we can do, is publish this so you don't become another victim, as unfortunately happened to other people.

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