On 27 Jul 2005 05:48:12 -0700, wrote:

Question?

I get emails in which people ask me to respond if I ship to nigeria and
if I take credit cards. weird since I don't sell anything, but what are
these people fishing for?

A sucker.

There are two main variants to their game.

In one, they place a large order for merchandise of an easily-sold
nature and "pay" for it with charges to credit cards which *appear* to
go through when initially submitted. The merchandise is delivered
either to an accomplice who shows up to collect it, or to a freight
forwarder who loads it into an air freight container and sends it on
before the charges can be reversed. Then, in a few days, the charges
are reversed, and by the banking laws in Nigeria, those reversals are
not subject to challenge.

In the second variant, the buyer insists that the seller accept
payment for the freight charges and pay the freight outbound.
Sometimes they even ask for payment to a "forwarding agent" who is
actually their own accomplice. Needless to say, the burned victim in
that case not only gets ripped off for the merchandise, but gets to
pay to have it delivered to the thief.

Once in a while, they will find a business run by someone gullible
enough to think it's OK to take an "international debit card"
transaction with a large cash-back component; the end result is the
same.

The fraudsters seem to be learning that the word is out about shipping
stuff to Nigeria. The last few such scam contacts have come from
email addresses in Israel, the Netherlands and the UAE, with
unspecified destinations...but they still flunked the basic test suite
of "Is it reasonable that my merchandise should be in demand there, is
there sufficient safety for me in acceptance of the payment method,
and can I afford the loss if this is a scam?" It only has to flunk
one of the three tests to keep me from responding.


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