the Latest Email Wedding SCAM
| Good day , Am Leigh Alexander, A wedding planner based in sacramento california , Right now , am handling a wedding ceremony for my clients getting married in few days .The wedding is expected to hold on the 5th of december, 2009, at 1075 University Ave Berkeley, CA 94702 time is 10am to 12 noon .There will be a holy matrimony between 10am and 10;30am, and the reception follows immediately at the same venue till 12noon, 50-70 guests are expected to attend. Sequel to my findings , i heard you a one of the competent photographers around .so i decided to contact you. The couple and i will be arriving few days before the event , so am trying to put all the necessary things in order before our arrival. I would like to know the to know your package prices, cos i need to know if its within my budget My companies reputation is at stake here , so i want this wedding to be at the best , I need you to assure me that you will deliver beautiful memorable pictures ,Get back to me with your response as we don’t have much time.thanks Best Regards, Leigh Alexander |
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Like other industries, the wedding market is full of would-be scammers. One of the biggest scams us vendors need to watch out for are the EMAIL, cashier’s check scam. They’ve been trying for years to scam wedding vendors [POSING AS WEDDING PLANNERS] with these cashier check schemes which often involve sending a cashier’s check for more than the amount and the vendor refunding the difference. I hope by now that wedding vendors can tell a scam from an email that LOOK LIKE THIS, or similar to this.
The scammers are getting smarter of course. This latest email spam, scam includes Names and Addresses. Here is the Email I just received.
The first sign that this is a scam is the FROM email address. If it were a legitimate email it would be from the WEDDING PLANNER’S domain. The second is that the FROM email address doesn’t match the NAME of the person emailing. Also it is a YAHOO email address. If this were a PRO wedding planner it would be from a domain. The third sign this is an email cashier’s check scam is that the address given where the wedding is going to be is not a wedding site. It is a gas station or something. I used Google Maps to find this out. Fourth the English is TERRIBLE…with sentences like this Sequel to my findings , i heard you a one of the competent photographers around .
You can read the email and pick apart things such as this
cos i need to know if its within my budget = A true wedding planner would not talk like this, any mention of budget would be if the CLIENT can afford it, not using the words MY budget. and words like COS. Looks like a teenager wrote this.
There are many Grammer and punctuations mistakes in this email. And finally, if it so urgent, where is the telephone number or name of the company that is at stake? No web url to refer to show this is legit.
PLEASE, if you get an email like this DO NOT EVEN RESPOND. At the very least you could end up with a virus or something in the next email.