A new scam has victimized thousands across the country, and it originates from Nigeria. The deal goes down over the Internet, usually dealing with a car, though other items have been involved, too.
An offer is made to the seller for an amount more than the asking price, usually to cover the cost of shipping the car from the seller to another location. The check arrives from a city in the United States—never Nigeria—and is so convincing it can fool the bank it's said to originate from. The cashier's checks look so real they have watermarks and other telling features. In one recent case, a local woman was skeptical about the overpayment, and took the cashier's check, which was printed on a Bank of America check from a San Antonio branch, with a Fex-Ex origin of Maryland, to a local branch of Bank of America. She shared her skepticism and asked whether the check was legitimate. The teller scrutinized the check and told the woman that it was, indeed, legitimate. She looked at the account that it came from and verified that it had been deducted. But a few days later, after the woman wired part of the money off to Toronto, the bank called and delivered the bad news: The check was a fraud. Though she still had the car, they'd just been wired $8,000 dollars.
"I think the most important thing is just to, in your own mind, ask some questions," says Harvey Radin, spokesman for Bank of America. "If someone is sending you an overpayment for something, you want to be rather skeptical about that, and in my own mind I would question why that would be the case. The other most important point is that it's always good if you know who you're dealing with when you're receiving a payment."
The FBI warns that if someone is willing to buy a car, sight unseen, for the asking price, that should set off warning alarms.
One representative from the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint center who wished to remain unnamed says that this scam has cropped up in the last year and a half and originates from Nigeria and Ghana. The criminals concoct elaborate schemes to get the money, and often begin their plan in chat rooms for large and lonely women, where they prey on insecurities and secure different shipping helpers across the United States (apparently there's at least one in Maryland and in San Antonio). They'll court a woman for weeks, and eventually profess their love. Then they'll explain that because they live in Nigeria it's difficult to send and receive packages, because of the country's reputation. They'll enlist the help of these women to repackage and ship items and (fraudulent) checks, so that the recipient doesn't have a chance to put the pieces together before going to the bank and spending the nonexistent money.