Sad but true. Keeping the economy rational means extending the line of
responsibility for funds back to the recipient. As any of the FOT lawyers
will tell you, you can get legitimately paid by a firm going bankrupt only
to be responsible for paying the money back once the creditors find the
transaction if it falls within a fairly long time window. How could you have
known they were going bankrupt? You couldn't. Scary, huh. We actually had a
million dollar transaction that almost went that way. We just slid by the
window. Of course that meant someone else got screwed.
Works the same way here--someone gives you a counterfeit money order, the
bank cashes it, detects the fraud, and takes the money back from you. Don't
have it? You owe it, and sooner or later they will get it. The money order
is a transaction between YOU and the bank. The scam artist on the other end
of the transaction doesn't matter.
The financial bit of the scam comes when the person buying your car sends
you a M.O. for a few hundred bucks more than the transaction. They "made a
mistake", or they "already had it for a transaction that was cancelled and
they can't cash it themselves" for some goofy reason. You send them the
three hundred bucks and that's all they were ever after. If they also get
your car they probably wouldn't know what to do with it.
There's worse out there. Some morons are still falling for Nigerian money
schemes, people get phished every day. The internet makes the local grifter
into an international business, the same way that it makes a garage sale on
your street into a globally-feasible eBay transaction.
Bill Babcock
Babcock & Jenkins
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-fot@Autox.Team.Net [mailto:owner-fot@Autox.Team.Net] On Behalf
Of Randall
Sent: Monday, December 27, 2004 5:58 AM
To: fot@Autox.Team.Net
Subject: RE: selling car to Japan
> Don't take money
> orders and assume they are good until your bank clears them
> completely. Many are forged these days.
Just to emphasize Bill's point ... it's apparently not uncommon for the bank
to post the funds to your account and then take them back in a few weeks
when the counterfeit check/money order is discovered. One fellow was
suspicious enough to open an account just to cash the cashier's check, then
withdrew cash when the check cleared. The bank called the Feds and he was
almost arrested !
Randall
|