I have also received this inquiry and already had a wedding signed up for that day and respectfully declined but the e-mail looked pretty legitimate and didn't relize till just reading this that it was a scam.
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I have recently been targeted along with many other wedding photographers by a scam. It goes like this:
I was contacted about a month and a half ago by a man named Beverly Jones with a request to shoot a wedding on October 16 at St. Ann's Church in East Liverpool, Ohio. I was available and told him that I would shoot it. He asked to know the price and where to send the check and I told him, and told me that he would be in Holland on a pre-wedding honeymoon. I waited and no check arrived. He continually emailed me asking why I had not contacted him to tell him that the check arrived. A month later I finally told him that he should probably track or cancel the check. He emailed me about a week ago to tell me that he tracked the check and discovered that courier company was updating their computers and that the check had been delayed for that reason. He told me that I could expect the check in a few days.
Still no check. He called me last night for the second time. Both times he used a phone service where he could type and the operator dicates what he types and types back to him my reply. So anyways, last night he tells me that the check should be there tonight or tomorrow morning and then continues to ask me for a favor. He asked for me to send $2000 to a "publisher" for the wedding and told me that there would be an additional $2500 added to the check--$2000 for the publisher and $500 for my trouble. At this point I still believed him. I thought he just wanted me to pass the money along until I realized that he was asking for me to send the money as cash via Western Union and to do it before I had actually recieved the check. This morning I called the Police and they told me that this was definitely a scam. I then called the small church in East Liverpool and the pastor there told me I was the second person to call today about this fictional wedding. He then told me that he has been getting calls from all over the world about this wedding, all from photographers who had been targeted by this scam. One photographer from Miami actually sent the $2000 and purchased tickets to come to the shoot before she realized she was duped.
So beware of any strange requests by your clients, and if you have been contacted by this scammer be sure to contact your local law enforcement agency, and whatever you do, do not send any money.
Am I missing something here? Why would a photographer be asked to send a check? I see nothing in this text that is even remotely convincing that sending $2000 is necessary.
WHAT!!!!!!! I can't beleive somebody would even remotely fall for this. This smelled like scam from the get go. The answering service crap and, they check not getting there, would make me respond in a way cya, I trust nobody unless it is booked under my terms.
Just looks like a variation on a theme... scammers have used this method by targetting people selling cars/trucks/bikes/whatever...they say a friend owes them money, so the friend will send you a cashiers cheque to you and you're supposed to WIRE the balance to him... and of course the cashiers cheque is bogus..and won't bounce for a couple of weeks...but by then you're supposed to have sent the wire transfer...and you're out money.
Guess the people on auto buy/sell/trade sites have wizened up, so the scammers are moving on to new targets.
tigasulo, basically they are sending the person a bogus cashiers cheque for more than what the photographer's fees would be...and asking the photographer to send the "payment" to some bogus magazine... via untraceable wire transfer, of course.
tigasulo wrote:
Thanks for the explanation Craig. But I still don't understand the part about how anyone would fall for that.
Well I'm taking a guess that nobody that's net-savvy would fall for it... but there are a lot of people that really don't know much past their AOL mail and browser...and most people still think cashiers cheques are as good as cash...which they aren't !
But even if you for some odd reason agreed to this fund transfer, wouldn't you at least confirm that the cashiers check was real, confirm the check cleared, or CASH the check and have the GREEN in your hand before you sent any funds back?
This is all too common, so people must be falling for it and people must be getting away with it.
Well I bet 99.9% of people think that cashiers cheques are as good as cash... they might take up to 2-3 weeks before they bounce... so if you deposited and saw the funds available in your bank account, you might think it has cleared, but it hasn't...even though you can pull the cash out of your account, the cheque still could bounce and then you're left holding the bag.
And yes, people must be biting, the scammers wouldn't bother if nobody fell for it.
Here's one guy that likes to bait the scammers and make them waste their time and money :
Well, I suppose all of you are way too smart to be tricked by a scam, but I originally posted this message in dpreview to help spread awareness of these kinds of scams. While I was not tricked because I would never send my own money on behalf of someone I have never met, until this I had no reason to suspect a scam. Sure there were red flags, but I do wedding photography on the side, and I have never heard anything about this type of scam. Its easy for you all to say that you would never be tricked but you have been warned. I was not warned, which is why I made that post so that others would be. If you are too smart to do nothing but poo poo those of us who care about preventing other photographers from being scammed no matter "how desperate or dumb" they are, then why don't you go back to measuring your little . . . lenses.
I don't think anyone in here didn't appreciate the heads up, but I think people on the FM forums are a little more 'net savvy than the crew at dpreview.
