SCAMMER->[email protected]<-SCAMMER*AVOID*

Hi all,

I have got an email from a guy called Al'Abdul. He was very interested to buy some hard drives which we had listed online. After 2 weeks of constant chasing and emailing, surprise surprise still no money had been sent to our business account had my doubts when he sent this email and straight away realized this guy is dodgy.

Here is what he said after I had sent his the P/I and bank details:

Dear Seller(my name is not shown due to privacy reasons),
Good morning , i have just been notified about it , the sum to be transfered to you was 8,120.00 GBP but there was a mix up in the process of making payment , Please i would urge you to keep an eye on the account as the total sum of £56,200.00 had been sent and it should in your account anytime soon,

Please kindly keep me inform as soon the funds arrives for further directives to be then given, because our client advise that we should continue with order despire the mix up in the amount .

We apologize for any trouble this might have caused but the joy of every business is to be able deliver on timely manner .

Will be waiting to hear from you soon .

Regards,

Al' Abdul Samad Trading Int'l
Founding Director/President
Sharjah 19b, Ramadah Street Al-Qasimia,
Sharjah United Arab Emirate.
Email: [email protected]
Tel:00971 559 230 904

STAY AWAY AND AVOID ALL PEOPLE ASKING FOR YOUR BANK DETAILS. THEY WILL SCAM RIGHT THROUGH YOU, IF THEY DO SOUND GENUINE THEN DO A BACKGROUND CHECK ON THEM OR JUST SEARCH THERE NAMES THROUGH GOOGLE.

Hi there

Just interested to hear exactly what happened with this?
was he expecting you to send the goods before funds cleared in your account? or was he trying to scam you in another way?

[AlanJones]

The scam is a classic overpayment scam.

The scammer has flashed the victim's bank account with a payment (probably by way of a fake cheque deposited in the account) and will ask the victim to send the overpayment back to him using Western Union or MoneyGram.

Eventually, the victim's bank will discover that the transfer was fake and will claim the funds back, leaving the victim down the amount that he transferred back to the scammer.

The scammer has no interest in the goods.

Ah i see....nasty.

what if the sender pays in by bank telegraphic transfer which involves BIC/IBAN, not by sending a cheque?

In that case, the money will most likely come from a phished account, or will be payment sent as part of a scam (e.g. rental deposit paid in response to a fake rental ad.)

Once the owner of the account realizes he has been phished or scammed, he will report the crime, and take action to reverse the transfers. While those actions are not always successful, they quite often are--and once again, the victim loses a lot.

Thanks Dotti!

I had an email yesterday from an international person wanting to buy a large quantity of goods and wants a Proforma Invoice...i haven't yet acted on it...do i assume he's a scammer now and not act but risk a possibility could be genuine, or go ahead with sending a PI (with bank details, BIC etc), but watch out for dodgy signals? Is sending bank details, with all bank info safe? He is also from UAE but not from this email address that has been reported.

[AlanJones]

It's a difficult balance between losing a genuine sale and not getting scammed.

A couple of things to consider:

Why is he ordering from you - are you able to supply cheaper than he could order in his own country or somewhere like China or are you a supplier of a niche product not available elsewhere. If not then you have to question his motives for ordering from you.

Is he writing from a free email address (i.e. gmail or yahoo etc) and claiming to represent a business. If so then it is likely to be a scammer as a legitimate business would write from their own domain (although saying that if he is writing from a business domain, it is worth checking the WhoIs details to see how long the domain has been in existence, who it is registered to etc.)

As I mentioned earlier, with these type of scams, the scammer is not normally interested in the goods he is ordering from you, he is interested in converting his fake cash into real cash that he gets you to send him. This will be done by either overpaying you and asking for a refund (or even cancelling the order and asking for a refund) or by asking you to pay some money to his "shipping company".

We recently almost got scammed by someone very similar to this Luckily a little niggle in the back of my mind made me do some online searching and realised that it was highly likely a scam.

He's going under the following identity:
Name: Ahmed Jamal
contact email: [email protected]
Company details: Abdul-Jamal Investment inc.., 21, Al Istiqal Street, Qasmia, Sharjah, United Arab Emirate.

We received an email requesting 155 items (that we make and sell) - because it initially appeared like a legitimate enquiry, we replied with some questions, which he swiftly answered - and immediately requested a proforma invoice. There were additional questions I needed to ask, which he, again, answered very quickly with the proforma request. Finally, I sent him a quote with some shipping options... but he just said "send proforma". The amount wasn't huge in the grand scheme of things... just over £4k... but for us it was, but it would have also involved a large amount of upfront spending by us to obtain the materials needed for the order

We were on the verge of doing it, when I did the search for the company name etc and came across this forum. The details are way too similar so my suspicions are now peaked.

I don't want to accuse him of anything ... just in case... so I send a polite email to him and state that "as the proforma invoice was being raised, his company name and address was flagged as invalid and that, at that stage, we couldn't continue with order... could he please help clarify the situation..."

No reply at all from him. Considering how quickly he replied to all previous emails.... his silence speaks volumes.

I'm SOOO glad I found your website and listened to that little voice in the back of mind.
Thank you for helping us not lose a lot of money (for us)!