Red Flags

[Dawn Brennan]

"We are Having Our wedding in your city,the date of our wedding is on November 14th,2008.They are still working on the venue and as soon as the venue is ready i will let you know.
Your services Are needed for our wedding,i want you to give me your fee,we will
be in State on (November 14th) by then the contract will have been finished
because am in New Zealand now for business.
Am a citizen of the state and my fiance is from New Zealand.Looking forward to
read from you soon."

This is an email I received this morning. I cut the first line out because it had some names, but I don't like the sounds of it. Its funny that they say throughout it that the wedidng is in "our city" but never mentions what city. Not to mention that most of the email makes no sense and if this person is from a citizen of "the state", they would know the correct language. Made me think its a scam... and I wanted to put it out there for others that may receive the same sort of thing. I have heard (both on here and elsewhere) that these are common and they'll overpay to have you disburse funds elsewhere and then the check they wrote bounces. Hope it helps someone!

[Chris Hurd]

Yeah, this is (or was) a common type of obvious scam. And that is the usual tactic, they purposefully "overpay" and expect you to immediately refund the difference... and you lose that money when your bank reveals their funds to be fraudulent. I'd love to have an article about this scam that we could refer to people who receive that sort of nonsense.

[Noel Lising]

That is a scam. I was fortunate to get an email from the Bridal Network about this scam and I decided to play along the would be scammer, he was from the UK and getting married, wanted the best, etc and wants to book your services for this date.

They will send you a check and overpay you, you would of course call them (note: they will not call you, this SOBs know when to walk away). If you call them, they would apologize and say a mistake has happened and the dp for caterer was included in your check. You can keep $ 200 for the inconvinience but please pay the caterer, he then gives you the contact person. You will never hear from them again.

[Chris Davis]

I got the same email a couple years ago. I also first noticed the "your city" and became suspicious.

[Travis Cossel]

I just got this email a few weeks ago and recognized it as a scam .. and decided to try and have some fun with it. My goal was to give them the runaround, but keep them communicating with me and get them frustrated. Funny thing is, I only got them to email me back once, and they gave up. Not very good con-artists if you ask me, lol.

I guess they expected me to read the initial email and just automatically send them some money. Idiots.

[Dawn Brennan]

Funny, I was thinking of doing the same thing.

[Dave Blackhurst]

Yep, most of the scammers are either from other countries or juveniles (some in adult bodies...) who think they can make a quick buck by finding someone dumber than they are... and sometimes they actually succeed... thus the sub-kindergarden message/sentence structure...

With the economy the way it is, this type of thing will probably be popping up even more - I've noticed the ol' "Nigerian scam" hitting my inbox quite a bit more often lately...

Fortunately we here on DVinfo are substantially brighter than these scamsters, and look at them more like a cat would a ball of yarn ... might be fun to play with them <wink>!

FWIW, I do a fair amount of international transactions via eBay, and MOST legitimate trading counterparties are WAAAAY more fluent than that scam e-mailer. The others make contact in their native language and we have to stumble through online translations...

[Travis Cossel]

Funny side story ... my wife recently had the following text convo on her phone:

dude: hey cory can i get some weed?

wife: This isn't cory. You have the wrong number.

dude: oh sorry. do you know where i can get some weed?


I couldn't believe this guy found out he had the wrong number and still asked where he could score some dope. My wife showed me afterwards and I was bummed out. It would have been so entertaining to have some fun with this guy ...

us: sure, man, we're at a party so meet us at 9pm at xxxxx and we'll hook u up for free! (where xxxx is like 20 miles away)

dude: okay, be there soon

::20 minutes later::

dude: hey no one is here

us: yeah, man party got shut down, we're at xxxx now, so meet us there (where xxxx is another 20 miles the OTHER way)

dude: okay


Anyways, I think you see where this could go. Ahhh, would have been fun.

[Jason Robinson]

Originally Posted by Dawn Brennan

Funny, I was thinking of doing the same thing.

419eater.com. fun web site. Look it up.

[Kevin Shahinian]

We get these emails often. You can ignore them or forward them to Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) | Home.

Some are more convincing than others. Complete wedding planning inquiries in broken english to a videographer is a giveaway.

The better ones ask only about videography, are in perfect english/grammer & even include the names and addresses of local venues in your area! They'll wait to pull the bait & switch (as in, oops! we sent you too much money!) until a few emails in. We told one scammer we never received the check... And made him/her send us three more, priority overnight UPS!!! as their "wedding date" was fast approaching ;)

Moving forward it's best to figure that any legitimate overseas client with the budget for a destination wedding in your area would be using a local coordinator, not directly emailing you.

Be cautious.

[William Smyth]

Originally Posted by Jason Robinson

419eater.com. fun web site. Look it up.

This American Life did a story about these guys that sent one of theses scammers on a wild goose chase. Hilarious stuff,