Scammers are getting more sophisticated

I spoke on the phone with the FBI yesterday and got some insight into this one - I originally reached out to them because this was one of the most elaborate money scams I had come across, and an agent called me back.

Here's the story... I get an email from a friend of mine, from his actual AOL email address that he's been using for years, basically saying his sister is in need of about $1500 for a surgery and is reaching out to all of his friends to see if he can get the money together. It was signed the way he normally signs his email, and the typing style was consistent with the way he usually talks. Nothing stood out at all.

I decided I'd just send him the full amount he was looking for and hit reply, but that's when I noticed something ... the reply-to address looked a little off. There was a zero where an "o" should be. Again, the message came FROM his real account, it even maintained the same conversation chain from the last time we talked (wasn't spoofed). But the reply-to email was one character off.

I called him up, he had no idea what was going on. Someone had hacked his account and gotten access to his contacts list. So I replied to the email, playing along and asking the scammer where I could send the cash to. He replied (this time from the email account with the zero) thanking me and asking me to send it either to the Western Union in Clarksville, TN, where his "sister" lives and gave me her name, or just to send it through PayPal. So I'm thinking "busted, sucka, you're in the United States" and started digging. Identified the so-called sister as a 71 year old woman, found her Facebook page, relatives, etc. Did arrest record searches, the whole nine. Nothing that really screamed "criminal" there.

So I turned all of the info over to the FBI, thinking maybe its identity theft and we could send some money to bait the perp and have an agent there bust whoever picked up the cash. Up until this point I'm thinking I'm dealing with an American scammer, not the classic nigerian money scam types.

And that's when the Agent calls me back and gives me the full detail... that the woman in Tennessee isn't the perpetrator, but also a victim. And it IS still a foreign scam - a fake SURVEY scam.

Basically there are networks of fake survey sites, promising to pay people for filling out surveys, and the "deal" you agree to as a survey taker is that when you receive payment for a survey, you're allowed to keep some percentage and then you pay the survey company their fee. Sounds familiar, right? It's the classic nigerian money scheme, disguised as a legitimate service - they tell the survey-taker that their payments come directly from the companies who contracted them to fill out surveys, and then rely on "the honor system" to collect their fees.

So these guys are playing both sides at once - one scheme to get a person to receive the money, and another scheme to get a person to send it to them. If I had sent $1500 to this 71 year old woman, she would have thought it was payment for a survey she took, accepted it, and then paid the Nigerian scammers their "fee" from it, never had any idea she was part of a foreign money laundering scheme.

Anyway, I've seen a lot of these scams over the years but never one this elaborate, where they actually created an AOL account that was this similar to the person they were pretending to be and combined multiple schemes to make a convincing, seemingly U.S.-based triangle transfer.

Anyway, I hope this message helps someone else also avoid something similar. Always keep your guard up when people are asking for money.