Counterfeit Cheque Scam - Why it Works
I read both Ed Dickson at www.fraudwar.blogspot.com and Tom Fragala at Identity Theft Blog regularly, through their RSS feeds. They have interesting ideas and timely reporting about identity theft, and I have learned a lot reading their posts.
Why is identity theft relevant to the purchaser of a business opportunity, franchise or distributorship? Identity theft, and the related scams it enables, plays an element in all fraudulant business opportunity schemes because of the use of aliases - no one who you talk to is who they pretent they are. Second, there is a particulary virulant form of a short con running on the internet -the fake counterfeit cheque scam- which even when it fails, succeeds in obtaining banking information from you.
Ed Dickson has a long post discussing how hard it is tell whether a cheque is counterfeit. Here is part of what he has to say:
"It's often difficult to verify that a check is counterfeit. They often use valid account numbers, which verify (easily) in the computerized telephone systems that most banks use today. Quite simply, unless the bank or the account owner is aware of that their account is being counterfeited - the item will appear to be legitimate.Furthermore -- a lot of banks have taken the stance in recent years -- that they will not verify whether a check is good, or not. It's getting harder all the time to verify checks with banks."
Reading The Art of the Steal will only confirm Ed's view.
However, here is where I may differ from Ed and Tom. They are pitching advice at individuals, urging them to be more rational and develop sophisticated due diligence steps to avoid the counterfeit cheque fraud. My advice is more straightforward - send a cheque or better, VISA, for services rendered and nothing else. Did you get goods, buy services? No? No cheque, then. Anything else is just trying to get something for nothing. which is guaranateed to be your loss.
Technorati Tags: identity theft, counterfeit, business opportunity, dickson, cheque, rss feeds, opportunity schemes, banking information, distributorship, account numbers, aliases, purchaser, scams, blogspot, franchise
