I was the target of an email scam
If only something too good to be true could be true.
I live a relatively quiet and secluded life, it’s a life I choose and enjoy. I don’t seldom take chances, I go to work, hang around the house and spend time with my wife and children.
Initial contact
I got an email last week from a “recruiter” who claimed to have found me on LinkedIn, he claimed to be looking for candidates to represent a Chinese equipment company in North America.
I checked my Linkedin profile and it was viewed by a few recruiters in the last couple of weeks, so I decided to go ahead and respond to the email, to show some interest.
Chao Chen
The day after I responded to the recruiter’s email, I received another, this time from a gentleman named Chao Chen.
This individual told me about a great opportunity that sounded too good to be true.
It was.
The job would consist of contacting North American customers owning products from Lonking Holdings Ltd and making arrangements for them to make payments directly to me, I would then transfer the payment on to China, minus a 5% fee for myself. Oh, and I would get a salary of five thousand dollars a month, for “expenses”.
Pretty good money for sending a couple of emails.
I decided to accept the offer, out of curiosity, and I began the process of being approved for the position, which consisted of sending a resume and waiting, for one day.
I’m approved
You guessed it, I was approved and authorized to get to work. No paperwork to sign or anything. They were ready to send me names of clients to make contact with and the money would come rolling in.
I decided to look deeper into this whole business.
I felt that this was some kind of scam from the beginning, but, considering they had not asked for any personal information I was not too concerned about it.
It was my wife who found this article from someone who had experienced the same thing, different company, but the same scam. The author describes nearly the same scenario that I have been presented with.
The result would have been this, these contacts would send me a check in my name and I was supposed to deposit it in my account, then transfer the money to the account of Chao Chen (who happens to be the real name of a Lonking Holdings executive) I would then face the unpleasant consequences of bank fraud.
I’m no expert, but I would assume that those consequences would be very unpleasant for me.
My thoughts
It was very interesting to read about the end game in this attempt to steal from me.
I used to think, like a lot of people, that “it wouldn’t happen to me”, but it almost did.
I’m not entirely sure what to think of myself. I did not fully believe that it was real, but, in the back of my mind, I had hoped that it was.
Is that a weakness of my character?
That’s probably the reason so many scams work. The hope that it is real, the hope that something too good to be true, might really be true.
With internet communication becoming the dominant method of contact, it’s becoming hard to determine what is real and what is not. One must be diligent about discovering the truth about who they are communicating with.
Maybe this experience has made me a bit more cynical.
