A new scam is running around. A bank account is cracked, real checks are printed, sent out in large numbers, the checks are deposited by people thinking they are for payment of “taxes” for a lottery and the “tax payment” is sent via Western Union / Moneygram to the “tax agent”, in other words, the scam artist. The name, bank information, routing number, security features on the check are all entirely legitimate. This way the group gets money sent to them without ever actually having to touch the bank.
I just got the 2nd one of these in a month and it’s ticking me off. My local police are too lazy to follow up on reporting this sort of scam (the route I took in the first case) so I’m throwing this out for a bit of international justice. Is there a coalition of the willing out there willing to bust scammers?
The “agent” gives a number of 011-491-60-91-92-39-92 which seems to be Germany. If anybody could trace this to a locality and get the police to act, I will press charges.
This seems like something you should talk to the FBI about.
This is going to be the 15th anniversary of the opening of my only brother’s missing person’s report. It was, and remains, a bizarre case, suitable for TV. In fact it *was* on TV and in the Washington Post. My brother remains missing. My confidence that the FBI will show any greater competence in tracing down something as low priority as mail fraud is as low as is humanly possible.
This particular fraud is a new, nasty variant of some very old scams and there are likely many, many people receiving and successfully cashing these checks. The next step is obvious, reducing the amount of the win and the “tax payment” from thousands to hundreds and varying the amount of the check on each individual run (the 1st bank that I called to verify put a stop order on all checks of a certain amount to that account).
This is a horrible bit of financial temptation. I don’t feel badly about adding an article so that anybody researching this on Google might have a better chance figuring out what’s going on. I just wish that a german reader might have passed on something to the police there.
Oh well. I’m very sure that there *will* be a next time.
This number that starts with 0609 might come from the Spessart forest area in Germany, just to the east of Aschaffenburg (on the Main river). I suggest calling the police in Aschaffenburg at 49-60218570. They should have someone who can speak good English to take down your complaint. Whether they do anything about it is anyone’s guess. Good luck.
Disregard previous post. I missed the one in front of the six. This doesn’t match any ort or kreis in the German telephone book. It’s likely a cell-phone. Try calling Deutsche Telekom’s fraud department.