Last week, I got a letter from a company that claimed that I had just won a trip for two to the Bahamas. Along with the award letter, they sent me a check for over 4,000 dollars. The check, the letter claimed, was to pay for the taxes for the award. All I had to do was call the number they provided and they would process my order.

I called the number and I spoke with someone with a thick accent. There was a great deal of noise in the background, and I couldn’t understand what he was saying. He told me to call back in three minutes. I didn’t bother.

So what’s the scam? You may ask.

It works like this. They will ask you to deposit the check in your account and wait for the check to clear. Once the check clears, they will ask you to send them the amount of the check in order to pay for the taxes. They will then process the order and you will have your dream vacation.

What you don’t know (and you aren’t alone, most people aren’t aware of this) is that when I check “clears” the bank, the funds might not actually be there. When a bank “clears” a check, it only means that it looks like the check is legitimate and that the funds will be available. However, if the funds originate from out of the country, it may actually take one to three weeks before the funds are actually deposited.

Or, in the case of this scam, it may be one to three weeks before the bank realizes that the funds are not going to be deposited. By this time, you have already sent your check to the scammers who have withdrawn the money from your account and made off with it. Guess who is responsible for the missing funds? That’s right, you are.

So how do you spot a scam?

Lets look at the materials they sent. There are a few things that should look suspicious to you if you ever get a letter like this.

Okay, this is the envelope. Its a plain, windowed envelope. The thing that should raise alarm bells is the absence of a return address. A legitimate company will always have a return address on their envelope, Especially if the envelope includes a 4,000 dollar check!

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Click to View the Envelope

Here is the letter. There are a lot of things wrong with it, but we’ll touch on just a few of them.

• This contest was supposedly sponsored by Reader’s Digest and Publisher’s Clearinghouse. If so, where are their logos? If these companies were sponsoring this contest, they would be sure that their company logos appeard on any reward letter.
• Black and white print. Low-quality print. You would expect a real reward letter to look flashy, colorful, and slick. In other words, it should look professional. I could have invented a better reward letter on my home computer and my 3 year old printer.
• Poor grammer and mispellings. This is a bit subtle, and the letter doesn’t actually have too many mispellings or misappllications of grammer. But there are a couple of them. A professional letter shouldn’t have ANY.

scam_letter.jpg
Click to View the Letter

Lastly, we have the check. This is the best part of the scam, because it looks very real. In fact, it IS REAL. There just aren’t any funds to back it up. They scam works because hey count on you to focus on the check, so that ignore the other things wrong with the letter and the envelope.

scam_check.jpg
Click to View the Check

A last bit of advice. This is a fairly low-class, low-budget scam operation. Be aware that there are scammers out there who have actually invested some money and time, and in those cases the materials will look very good. The best thing to do is to do research. Thank goodness for the Internet!