We’ve all heard of the Nigerian scam usually involving an email that some dignitary has left a pile of money and they want to launder it via your account but you can keep 10Million$ for helping!
Well, with our greater involvement with the internet our charity has been targeted at least twice by similar scams.
The first was an email saying they wanted to make a donation to the Charity. Obviously it is not unusual for us to receive letters or emails like this. We have to assume initially that they are legitimate.
Well, they were emailed to say that the cheque should be made payable to “Brownbread Horse Rescue” and sent here. A cheque for £4,500. duly arrived and was paid in. A day or so later there was a garbled, indeed partly incomprehensible email, to say that the secretary had sent too much by mistake and some of the money was needed for a heart by-pass on a child in, yes, you guessed, Nigeria.
Needles to say we ignored this email. However, the cheque was returned to us as fraudulent/counterfeit/stolen. I looked up the name of the firm from where the cheque was drawn and it was a legitimate company (except they never answered my subsequent letter. Our HSBC bank charged our account £4 for the returned cheque. The police did nothing about the scam.
Another scam attempted on some friends was also an email offering £10,000 to buy a horse, unseen that was only worth about £1,000. Nothing was asked about the horse. Like the other emails the quality of English and writing was not very good.
This scam is still running and our friends expect a false cheque will arrive with a request for the “shipping payment” (that has already been mentioned) to be sent immediately to ensure the horse is picked up and transported.
Yet another attempted on our Charity was an offer of a donation of £10,000 currently held by a Merchant Bank in London and we had to confirm that the funds were to be used for the Welfare of the horses. In this case they gave full details/addresses etc of the bank and other financial institutions involved. Of course I contacted the bank immediately and they had received seven other similar queries from other charities that same morning!