This person friended me from an online game I played asking if I wanted to be paid to be a penpal. I’m familiar with a lot of phishing scams and other sorts of scams but I’ve never seen a scam like this one. What exactly is this person trying to get from me, are they hoping to infect my device with something sinister or are they trying to phish information from me without me knowing it? They seem to put a lotta emphasis on me VIEWING this photo they’re gonna send me and it makes me think that whatever they’re gonna send me must be infected with some sort of trojan. Can someone explain to me what’s going on here?
They are trying to get you to deposit a counterfeit check. It most likely wouldn’t clear your bank, but if it did, you end up on the hook for the entire amount of the check with no money, and they get the amount that you sent “back” to them.
I’m just here to say nice username
I’m going to outline this so everyone knows how this works in detail. There’s a number of comments talking about metadata, but this is remote check fraud.
The key dialogue is here:
“Okay the check will be written here then I’ll take picture of the check front and back then send it to you and you preview it on your laptop or iPad then you log in your bank app and take the snapshot to the provided space and you get the money”
Phase 1
- Fraudster sends an image of a check through e-mail
- You use your computer to view the check
- You then use your phone’s bank app to deposit the check
- Your bank is required by US Law to make up to $500 available immediately
Phase 2
- The fraudster makes an excuse of why they can’t do it any more or mentions that they over paid
- They ask you to send money through an untracable manner (Bitcoin, gift cards, etc)
- They may say something like you keep some for your effort or just lean on your kindness
- Your bank realizes that this check is fake or been used already
- You bank withdraws that amount from your account
This isn’t an unusual scam, but it’s technically illegal for you to deposit a picture of a check. You need the original.
Best to block and report them.
Scam. Incredibly obvious scam, so much so that frankly I’m surprised you think you might be paranoid.
It’s because the other piece was still missing: how they actually get money from OP, which comes after the original “payment” goes through.
It’s called remote deposit cheque fraud. It’s a fake cheque. If you cash it, it will eventually get flagged as a a fake, and the bank will take the money back, even if you’ve already spent it or sent it to the scammer. And if you never send money to the scammer, they get nothing, but it also costs them nothing to make the attempt, because you’re the one depositing the cheque and wearing the risk.
What happened to checks needing to be cleared first by banks? Do they just accept them now and deal with it later?
I haven’t used a check in… 30 years I think.
Most banks will, as a courtesy, deposit a certain amount immediately while the remainder waits to be cleared. My bank will pre-deposit $500 of any check and then the rest several days later. Or at least they used to. It’s been like 10 years since I had to depsoit a check.
Depending on the amount and the history of the customer cashing it you may get the funds right away. Probably not for a 1000$ but less then 200 or so. Eventually it will clear and you’ll get boned if it was bad.
The way I understand it, scammers use the most incapable, podunk banks possible so it takes the most amount of time to fully clear a check, usually hoping that the mark will cash it in and send the scammer a portion of the bad check, so the mark is left with the bag. From the mark’s bank’s pov, the mark has spent more money than they were ever entitled to.
I find it so weird that parts of the world never moved away from the cheque system. I used my last one mid-90s or so.
SEPA bank transfers are cheap and real time.
On top that cheque system is so ripe for fraud.
And then those parts of the world scoff at parts where people don’t use a credit card for every little thing.
Ooohhhh okay
I used to deal with these types of scams all the time on Craigslist. These guys aren’t even pretending to be legit anymore it seems.
I’m genuinely surprised that any business still accepts cheques.
DON’T DO IT. Just say you did. Lie to them for as long as possible. If they ask for proof you can’t give them, pretend to be dumb af and not understand their instructions.
If a clanker calls you, keep feeding them bogus instructions until they enter an inifite loop to waste their tokens. Kitboga has a YouTube video showing how to do it easily.
100% a scam - I fell for it from a Fiverr account, scalpers will find any prior relationship and use it to get bitcoin.
Report and move on.
If you’re logged into your bank account and the image contains embedded code and you’re vulnerable to the exploit, there’s a good chance that they’ll be attempting to transfer money out of your account.
If it sounds like a scam … and this does … it’s generally cheap insurance to treat it like a scam.
Moreover, if it’s unsolicited, as in, they came to you, the chances are significantly higher that it’s a scam.
A stranger is sending you free money? That’s a scam.
Yeahh im aware, but the curiosity what what it is they were trynna do had me titillated 🥴 I wanted to see how it’d play out
Likely they send you a bad check, ask for a cut or say they over paid, check bounces and funds go away from your account, they keep there cut, you take the 100% of the loss.
As long as you understand that you absolutely are taking the risk of fraud being assosiated with your own personal bank account.
Like don’t post in 2 days “GUYS!!! I WAS HACKED!!! THEY STOLE EVERYTHING!!!”
Nah I aint givin this fucker my bank account. I do wanna troll the shit out of em but idk how to go about it other than just wasting his time by yapping about random shit
Oh, ok.
I remember when I was 17, my mom would hand me the phone whenever telemarketers would call.
I’d waste their time as a hobby. Sometimes I’d say my mom was on vacation in Jamaca, eating lots of blue flavored snow cones. Other times I’d say she was in the shower.
Either way, I’d start a counter to see how long they’d stay on the phone with me. My record was 2 hours 26 minutes. And my mom actually ended it. She came up and asked who I was talking to. I held up the hand signal for telemarketer.
She was in one of her pissy moods, so she grabbed the phone out of my hand, and screamed into the phone “THIS IS HIS MOM! WE DON’T WANT ANY!!!” and hung up.
To this day, I still believe I could have hit the 5 hour mark if she had just let me.
My reasoning was if they’re talking to me, they AREN’T talking to someone who could be scammed.
What’s the hand signal for telemarketer?
Ok, don’t do a thumbs up. But also don’t do a thumbs down either. Do one kind of halfway between up and down, where it’s kind of pointing to the side.
We innitially wanted something where your fingers make the shape of a T, but as it turns out, it is really really hard to move your fingers into the shape of a T. Try it. It’s akward, and painful, and it kinda sorta can be done…but also we hate it, so we decided on the thumb to the side thing. Easy to do, easy to read once you see it. That was the important part.
I feel like🖕would’ve worked fine (assuming you don’t otherwise make rude gestures at your mom).
Open a new banking account. . Deposit the check digitally, block the scammer, deposit into the new empty account. Let it sit for a few months. If the money is still there. You have won.
Most likely the check will will be fraudulent and revoked within 1 or 2 weeks.
Tell them they’re so fun, you want to pay them to be your penpal, and you’ll send them a picture of $50
Yes it’s a scam, they probably want you to buy something right? They’re going to try and send you a fake check, in which they will ask you to digitally cash it in so it doesn’t go through a teller. The check doesn’t actually get checked by anyone due a couple days so you would have effectively stolen money. Then once they convince you to buy something for yourself and/or for themselves they basically fuck off then the bank would be like hey that check wasn’t real, instead of reporting you/done this is the first time we’ll just charge your account for the check.
If your still adamant on them being real, take the check to a teller at the bank. Make sure the check is physical. Make sure the sender it matches their name and the bank is actually real (by the routing numbers not the logo on it)
Wait, checks are still not automatically cryptographically verified in seconds? How is anyone still using this? (Ironically, checks never really caught on in my country, the Czech Republic)
This would require the bank industry to invest in technology, and that would cost money. Banks are for making money, not spending it. Charge just enough to the consumers to cover whatever losses are brought about by the archaic system and you successfully pass on all losses to the account holders.
Idk, there’s just quick checks, ig banks just trust ya 🤷♀️
Until they check manually in a labor-intensive process and you are punished again for having been scammed. It’s inefficient and the wrong people pay the price.
We didn’t mean that to sound positive, in our opinion, checks are pretty out dated. Even the last few jobs we had required us to have a bank account since they don’t do checks either.
It’s definitely inefficient, but the banks don’t get hurt so we doubt they’re going to improve anything.
You would have to be an idiot to entertain this. Block, move on, and ignore in the future. It’s unlikely you’re even talking to a real person.
This is the first stages of a very textbook fake check scam. They will provide a (unbacked) check, you can cash it and see the funds appear in your account. Something will happen, maybe they’ll realize they overpaid you by a few hundred dollars and ask you to refund that amount. The original check funds will be pulled after a few days when the financial institutions realize they were fraudulent and you’ll be out whatever amount of real funds you sent.
Now that you know this is a scam, even accepting the fake check is a felony.
I wasn’t planning on accepting a check from some rando online. That much common sense I do have. I will admit I am a bit of an idiot for entertaining them because I deadass CANNOT help myself.
I lowkey-highkey just wanna fuck with em in some way or waste his time. I used to troll fake VRchat model artists with zip bombs, but I’ve never really encountered a check scam before, so I was curious about it, hence why I asked.
I already know it’s a scam, but I was curious on the specifics of the scam. I like learnin about shit and was curious
Get them to send you the check.
Say you deposited it.
See what happens.Offer steam gift cards as the payment for the inevitable “I sent too much” part of the scam. Steam is no longer selling physical gift cards.
So you can waste some time pretending to go to a shop, unable to find them, trying other shops etc.Kitboga is a master at wasting scammers time if you want some YT vids to watch.
It’s a bot. You’re not trolling anyone but yourself
There are fewer red flags in Beijing on May Day.
scam. every photo you take with wny device has metadata. dont send them anything. block them immediately. dont even say bye.
Yes, it’s a scam. Doesn’t really matter what’s going on other than it’s a scam.
Do they even play the game?
Yea I think even if you’re unfamiliar with this particular scam, the pushiness for this particular method of payment is a big red flag.
Not even sure, they were a low level player and dont seem to play all that much anyways. The fact they wanted to add me on discord to chat there was sus enough for me. But I just wanted to lead em on cus i was curious where it would go
