[Rodney]

Guess not. Please tell me the scam. What should I look for? You said that you’ve had these kinds of requests before. What countries do they come from?

I get emails (even phone calls through the TDD phone system) like this all the time, but then again, yours *might* be a legitimate offer.

Usually they are from an African country like Ghana/Kenya/Nigeria (although sometimes eastern European). They will ask for a large number of items to be paid for by credit card or even western union. They will offer to send the credit card information via email and bill to their fedex account number.

Here's one email I dug out of my archives that didn't get deleted:

> i am bruce cole manager of
> brucecompanyltd i will like to order for some goods
> to my store in nigeria right here in lagos i will
> pay u by the following payment listed bellow,dont
> hesitate to mail me back if my request is consider
> under ur establishment hope to here from u soonest.
> companycreditcards;visacard or mastercard
> western union money transfer;

We actually had ONE very large legitimate order from Nigeria, but I still would say that 99.99% of the ones received are scams.

 

[Rodney]

So how can you tell the difference between legit orders and scams?

I start with the basic assumption that they are all scams (that fit my red flag system in my head) until proven otherwise.

The one order (out of literally over 1000 fraud emails) that was legitmate actually didn't start out sounding "fraudish". It was a standard quote request, follow up, etc. When the customer told us (by phone) where it would be shipping to, that's when the red flags went up

After that, we did all types of background checks on the customer, reference checks, company background info, phone calls and finally deduced that it was a "real" order.

 

[Rodney]

Can you please advise a good company for these background checks.

Google is actually a good place to start. Lots of information on companies can be found there if they are doing any dealings online.

How can you tell if the potential customers is a fraud or not? What are some of the things you guys look for in these reports?

I work on sort of a "weighted red flag" system I developed in my head Certain things are more "fraudy" than other things. Certain things aren't a big deal unless they are coupled with other "flags".

For example, an IP address saying that the person ordering is from Indonesia when the shipping address is Detroit, Michigan is a HEAVY redflag (let’s say a 5).

A shipping address that doesn’t match the billing address isn’t really a HEAVY redflag, but coupled with other redflags, it could be cause for concern, so we’d give a shipping/billing address mismatch a 1.

Once an order reaches a certain point level (Say 5-10 points), the order is held for manual review and credit card owner verification by phone/email/fax.

Order size, international order, free email address used, etc are all different weighted flags that you can adopt for your own purposes.