Playing a scammer like a trout

Balrog

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We received the following request from dojolocater.com:

John's Message:


Hello I want you to get back to me with the total estimate for 1 month private training for 5 people 3(Female) aged (15, 17 and 21)and 2(Male) aged (16 and 20) for 1 months 2hr daily 3 times a week.they will be coming with a private transportation driver for the service.I will be expecting your reply with the total cost and your full name,address and direction for the private transport to locate your place when they are coming for the service.

Needless to say, it's a phish message. I promptly responded back to him and let him think that he had a fish on the line. I managed to play him for nearly a week and had him salivating at the prospect of getting a big batch of money....until he sent me an actual credit card number to make the charge on. I promptly called the cops and turned it over to them at that point.

It's fun playing these mugus for jokes!
 

JP3

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We Needless to say, it's a phish message. I promptly responded back to him and let him think that he had a fish on the line. I managed to play him for nearly a week and had him salivating at the prospect of getting a big batch of money....until he sent me an actual credit card number to make the charge on. I promptly called the cops and turned it over to them at that point.

It's fun playing these mugus for jokes!
I guess that's fun, but for me I'd have wasted a week's effort just to get the ending, "Yeah! Take that, you moolie..." feeling. Which would last about 5 seconds. I just hang up on dojolocator and get on with life.
 

Martial D

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We received the following request from dojolocater.com:

John's Message:


Hello I want you to get back to me with the total estimate for 1 month private training for 5 people 3(Female) aged (15, 17 and 21)and 2(Male) aged (16 and 20) for 1 months 2hr daily 3 times a week.they will be coming with a private transportation driver for the service.I will be expecting your reply with the total cost and your full name,address and direction for the private transport to locate your place when they are coming for the service.

Needless to say, it's a phish message. I promptly responded back to him and let him think that he had a fish on the line. I managed to play him for nearly a week and had him salivating at the prospect of getting a big batch of money....until he sent me an actual credit card number to make the charge on. I promptly called the cops and turned it over to them at that point.

It's fun playing these mugus for jokes!
I must have missed something. They wanted to pay you a bunch of money to train 5 people for a month...at what point would you have transferred funds to them, and why? Ive never had anyone pay me to train me before.
 

Headhunter

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Mmm yeah cool you tricked them but you should've called the police straight away so they could've been caught straight off. By not doing so you could've allowed them to scam other people during that week.
 

Buka

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I will spend an inordinate amount of my personal time going after scammers who contact me. Foolish, I know, but it's a hobby I have always loved.
 
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Balrog

Balrog

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Mmm yeah cool you tricked them but you should've called the police straight away so they could've been caught straight off. By not doing so you could've allowed them to scam other people during that week.
Possibly so, but I didn't have anything real to give to the cops until the mugu sent me a credit card number that I am positive was stolen.
 

jks9199

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Mmm yeah cool you tricked them but you should've called the police straight away so they could've been caught straight off. By not doing so you could've allowed them to scam other people during that week.
It's not always possible for the police to catch these guys or do anything to them... There are tons of jurisdictional issues, problems simply finding them... I traced the money in one fraud as far as a storage unit in FL before it went overseas, for example. Even had a suspect, but didn't have enough to compel him to talk to me. They're just often very tough cases to investigate or prove. And they're under-reported because many people don't want to admit being fooled...

One afternoon, I kept one scammer on the phone for over 2 hours. Was trying to get him to front me the money for his scam... He'd almost scammed a little old lady before we got called... fortunately a caregiver stepped in and called us.
 

JowGaWolf

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We received the following request from dojolocater.com:

John's Message:


Hello I want you to get back to me with the total estimate for 1 month private training for 5 people 3(Female) aged (15, 17 and 21)and 2(Male) aged (16 and 20) for 1 months 2hr daily 3 times a week.they will be coming with a private transportation driver for the service.I will be expecting your reply with the total cost and your full name,address and direction for the private transport to locate your place when they are coming for the service.

Needless to say, it's a phish message. I promptly responded back to him and let him think that he had a fish on the line. I managed to play him for nearly a week and had him salivating at the prospect of getting a big batch of money....until he sent me an actual credit card number to make the charge on. I promptly called the cops and turned it over to them at that point.

It's fun playing these mugus for jokes!
I got hit with this one earlier this year.
 

Tez3

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Here, the City of London police has an email address you can send all scamming and phishing emails to, I regularly send them the ones I get. They don't reply or investigate them singly but collate them all so they can track down the people responsible.

this is the only American site I'm on and occasionally I get genuine looking emails from the FBI and the Bank of America, both say I have money to me by various means. I have to say as a non American and not knowing either of these organisations I could be easily mislead by the official looking emails. However as I'm not a customer of the bank as they said I was it's easy to see it's a fraud in the making. The FBI one I actually sent to the real FBI following advice from someone on MT who gave me an address to send it to.

A 'popular' scam here are someone phoning you telling you they are from your bank, your bank account and card have been compromised so you are requested to give the bankcard to the courier who will call to pick it up. A lot of older people have been caught by that one. the banks usually refund the money though but it doesn't mitigate the distress people feel when they find out they've been scammed.
 
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Balrog

Balrog

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The truly sad thing is that, if these jerks would get a job and work half as hard at it as they do at screwing people over, they'd be quite successful.
 

Andrew Green

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I must have missed something. They wanted to pay you a bunch of money to train 5 people for a month...at what point would you have transferred funds to them, and why? Ive never had anyone pay me to train me before.

It's a very, very common scam that martial arts schools and similar business get. I've gotten this sort of request quite a few times and just ignore them.

Anyways, next stage is they agree to pay a pretty decent chunk of change for the lessons, all upfront. Except for some reason (hospital, out of country, etc) the person paying can't come in personally and will be sending the kids with a driver. The driver can't take credit cards, so they ask if you would kindly charge the drivers fee to the card as well and pay him cash.

The card is going to be a stolen one. You charge the card, pay the cash, and then the charge gets reversed as it's a stolen card.
 

Andrew Green

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So they make out with just..the drivers fee?

I've never played the game out, but I understand the drivers fee to be a decent chunk. This is a commercial driver paid for the whole period up front in the $1000 range. So it turns into charge me $4000 on this card and give the guy $1000 of it.
 

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