Scam? Checks via Email

It’s a scam. That will probably develop into an “Advance-fee fraud” once you have bitten the hook.

Advance fee fraud, is a type of fraud in which businesses or individuals are required to pay a fee before receiving promised stocks, services, money, or products, which ultimately are never given. The targets of the fraud receive a solicitation (by letter, fax, or e-mail) from someone who has a free check just for you, which you need to deposit. To ensure this will happen, the recipient of the letter is asked to pay a percentage of the total amount that purportedly will be wired or transferred. But at the end of the day, the transfer never happens.

For more information look up "Advance Fee Fraud"

What will likely happen after you deposited the scanned check is that the check will bounce after a couple days because it's either not covered or because it is from someone else's account. The money in your account will then go back to where it came from.

But that alone doesn't get the scammer anything. Possible ways the scammer could benefit from this:

• Scam you out of goods or services. Whatever you expected to get paid for, you don't.
• Advanced fee fraud. Get you to pay money in order to receive and cash the check.
• Abusing you as a money mule. After you got the money they ask you to send part of the money back to them in a way which can not be as easily reverted. The check gets reverted but your payment doesn't.

No genuine person would need you to prove that you'd deposited the cheque. Depositing a genuine cheque would be overwhelmingly to your advantage, so any genuine person would just take you at your word if you said you'd done it. And if they wanted to be sure, why wouldn't they just look at their own account to see if the money had gone?

The beauty of them sending you the picture is that it is easy for them to send essentially the same picture to several different people. The routing number is legitimate (it will match a banking institution), the account number and name probably is too, but maybe not.

The next step after you prove that the deposit was made, is that they will tell you oops I sent you too much, so please get the money from your bank, and buy them a money order and send it to an address they will give you. After you mail the money order the check image they sent you will bounce.

You will probably find that you violated the terms and conditions related to remote deposit by depositing a check that you never had possession of.

It isn't their account. It's either cunningly faked to take quite a long time to actually bounce, or it is a real person's account, e.g. Susan Danvers as I describe here.

Asking for the deposit acknowledgement serves no purpose, it is merely theater to test/increase your confidence.

The scam will come later, as they contrive a pretense to have you wire some of the money back to them.

Then it will bounce or be clawed back by Susan Danvers.

A picture of a check, like the one they want you to use, IS NOT A SIGNED CHECK. Do not do it!! When law enforcement comes looking for you it will be you that committed wire fraud.

This is a version of the "tutor scam." I'm an Arab Oil sheik or a member of the British royalty and I've sent my 15-year-old son to study in America. He needs a tutor and you come highly recommended. How much would you charge to tutor my son for 2 hours per week for 15 weeks? "Oh...say...$8000." Fine, I'll send you a check for $10,000. My son has a nanny and she doesn't have a US bank account so in order to pay her, I need you to deposit the check and then withdraw $2000 to give to the nanny. She'll be by to pick it in a couple days. "Duh...sounds good. Here you go." Then the check bounces and I'm out $2000.