Someone wants to send me cash by DHL. How's this scam supposed to work?

An uncle of mine fell for a variant of that scam last April. This is what happened in his case:

• He had a 2nd hand Apple laptop for sale for 250 Euro and advertised it on Marktplaats (the Dutch equivalent to Craigslist).

• Was promised a DHL swap. Envelope with the cash in exchange for the laptop. (He wasn't aware DHL doesn't do that sort of thing.)

• A white mini-van comes to his house. Here in The Netherlands DHL uses a lot of independent sub-contractors that use their own cars/vans without DHL logo. So that is by itself not unusual. (Does that happen in France, too?)

• The driver wears a yellow and red jacket and baseball-cap that looks like the DHL colors.

• The driver gives the sealed envelope to my uncle. He opens the envelope and sees 5 bills of 50 Euro, which appears OK.

• The driver presents a clipboard with a printed form that my uncle needs to sign for accepting the "swap". Seems very official, but he is a bit old-school and isn't aware that all transport firms these days use phones or handhelds computers with a fully digital order tracking system. So, my uncle signs the form, hands over the box with the laptop and the driver loads it in the mini-van and drives away.

• A day later my uncle tries to pay for something in a shop with one of those 50 Euro bills and discovers they are fakes. Pretty good fakes, but still fakes.

According to the police-officer he talked to this is a fairly common scam. They specifically target elderly people (they estimate age from the sellers profile on the market-place website or an associated Facebook profile) with a low sales-ratio (or even better: 1st time seller). They hope that an elderly and hopefully inexperienced seller isn't that familiar with shipping company policies and way of working. They try to get some more info on the seller via their initial contact to confirm how savvy the seller is about this. Contact goes by (burner)-phone or throw-away email address. If the seller appears too savvy they will quickly cancel the deal.

And in case of my uncle they got it completely right. It was his first online sale ever and his only previous experience with DHL (or any other shipping firm) was just receiving of goods.

DHL and DHL drivers etc need to be fake, the scam will still work. Scammers setup DHL accounts fake or otherwise. Once the swap is done - DHL will simply mail out the goods to the scammer and seller is left holding fake currency or fake bank check (or whatever). DHL itself could get scammed in the process if they themselves got paid by a fake check- that also happens.

Another thing to be careful about is a scam where the scammer pretends to deliver a genuine shipment from the company, sent by someone as a surprise (flowers, box of chocolates... money?), but on the door, they first hand you the delivery in a friendly manner and then they say that the postage is not paid for it and ask for say EUR 1-2.

The idea is that the delivery package must be presented as appealing and valuable and then the tiny postage cost should seem completely insignificant to you.

However, there is the catch, the delivery driver will say that it's company policy to not take cash and only take card payments and will carry a small portable bank card terminal on themselves.

This in fact will be a card copying machine. Of course, to authorize the payment they will hand you the "terminal" which is where you will fill in your PIN code, which is the final piece of the puzzle.

Then they will go away and use your card via the copy.

Tell them to PayPal you...

Kidding, stay away from them.