Judging by the volume of emails I am receiving from SOS readers selling gear on our site, it looks like the gang that perpetrate the Scam explained above are back!!

These guys have emailed lots of sellers on the site, and one or two trusting souls have been caught out unfortunately.

The cheques the Scammers send do clear initially into your account, because they are exploiting a little-known loophole in that high street banks (I am told) no longer verify cheques locally within each branch but despatch them to collective centres and it can take several weeks before a cheque is cross-checked against signatures or found to be counterfeit.

Thus, the cheque appears to clear and honest readers have sent the difference/balance on to the (scam) buyer, who has no interest in buying your keyboards or whatever, they just want the cheque for the balance to clear into their accounts. This leaves you out of pocket when the Bank eventually inform you that the cheque was indeed a forgery!

One poor reader who contacted me "sold" his studio kit for £3200 and got a cheque for £7000 and, being honest, sent off the difference to the scammers after their £7000 cheque appeared to clear OK (only for it to be returned by the Bank 2 weeks later).

By replying to these Scammers (scum?) and depositing their cheque, you leave yourself wide open to possible action from the Bank against you for trying to deposit a forged cheque! Frown

The Police have no time to investigate matters like these, hence the Scams continue to be perpetrated on our readers and most other web sites around where people sell things.

To protect seller identities from automatic harvesting programs that attack such sites, SOS already hides the email address of the Seller, but there are some clever people out there who find ways around anything.

In the end, you have to trust your instinct when you receive "scam spam" like the Nigerian email shown at the top of this thread. Walk away and do not reply. If the writing style is poor and it looks like they know nothing about your specialist equipment, then do not reply to such emails.

Be careful.

Ian Gilby
Managing Director/Webmaster