- Joined
- Oct 2, 2018
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If you advertise your business, you may be solicited by what appears to be a big customer.
They will make a big effort to represent themselves as a legitimate entity such as someone that can be googled and verified as a local real estate company or contractor. They may even use that actual person's photo from their company's site as their google avatar.
TLDR: What they do is a typical fake check scam where they send you fraudulent payment and ask you to forward part of the money to another party. However, these days this can be done with online credit card processing if you offer it as an option.
Unfortunately, you'll waste your time writing up a quote and sending an invoice before they unleash this next obvious bit.
They'll follow up with a request to modify your quote/invoice to assist them in paying another involved party such as an architect or a surveyor for which they'll want to pay you a lot more: "due to limited availability of resources in the hospital so i would like you to please include his commitment fee"
I had this happen and at this point realized I wasted my time, but I was curious how they intended to give me the fake money, so I allowed him to proceed.
In my case, they actually sent the credit card payment to me and funds appeared to be cleared/available to take, but my credit card processing vendor noted that they used multiple credit cards and zip codes attempting to get the payment to me.
Most definitely a chargeback would result as soon as the suspected stolen credit card transaction is caught and I would bear full responsibility for returning the money to the credit cardholder.
They will make a big effort to represent themselves as a legitimate entity such as someone that can be googled and verified as a local real estate company or contractor. They may even use that actual person's photo from their company's site as their google avatar.
TLDR: What they do is a typical fake check scam where they send you fraudulent payment and ask you to forward part of the money to another party. However, these days this can be done with online credit card processing if you offer it as an option.
Unfortunately, you'll waste your time writing up a quote and sending an invoice before they unleash this next obvious bit.
They'll follow up with a request to modify your quote/invoice to assist them in paying another involved party such as an architect or a surveyor for which they'll want to pay you a lot more: "due to limited availability of resources in the hospital so i would like you to please include his commitment fee"
I had this happen and at this point realized I wasted my time, but I was curious how they intended to give me the fake money, so I allowed him to proceed.
In my case, they actually sent the credit card payment to me and funds appeared to be cleared/available to take, but my credit card processing vendor noted that they used multiple credit cards and zip codes attempting to get the payment to me.
Most definitely a chargeback would result as soon as the suspected stolen credit card transaction is caught and I would bear full responsibility for returning the money to the credit cardholder.
