Dinner Reservation Scam

[webhick]

Saw this while cleaning the spam out of the food pantry's email:

Subject: Dinner Booking
From: Prof Wilson <profwillson11 at gmail.com>
To: [redacted]

Hello,
I am Prof Wilson.I want you to book dinner for 15 guests from my
Department arriving in your country. They will all come for dinner on
26th,27th,and 28th March, 2010 by 7.00pm each day.

Kindly get back to me with estimated cost of your menu if there is
availability so that I can proceed with the payment. Note, all payment
would be made with credit card before our arrival.

Please,do not hesitate to get back to me immediately with the types of menu.


Best regards,

Prof Wilson

From what I'm seeing around, it's a pretty standard scam. They have you charge an exorbitant amount to their credit card and then have you give the majority of it to a local car company. You find out later that the credit card was bogus and you're out the money.

[bmielke]

I have also heard where they have you charge a large sum of money and give them the difference, they usually say they are trying to avoid cash advance interest rates.

[fortinbras]

A very similar form of this scam, including the cash advance, used to be done, decades ago before checks could be cleared almost instantly, with conventional checks.

[Lambkin]

Dear Dr Wilson,

We will be pleased to feed your delegation at the soup kitchen at no charge.

In Christ,

Sister Maribel McGillicuddy

[webhick]

Dear Dr Wilson,

We will be pleased to feed your delegation at the soup kitchen at no charge.

In Christ,

Sister Maribel McGillicuddy

Actually, if it wasn't dangerous to respond to these types, I'd probably send this:

Dr. Wilson,

My condolences for the recent opossum incident. I'm sure that it looking more scared of you than you of it was all just an act. I could see in its calculating eyes the many ways it intended to maim you and make you scream like a little girl.

Thank you for the interest in booking your reservation at our establishment. We feel very honored that you would think to grace our food pantry with your presence. That being said, we have a few concerns and requirements:

- We'll need $20k so that we may add a kitchen to the back our establishment. Remember, it has to be a commercial kitchen, given the nature of our business. I will not negotiate this price. I really want a double oven and a walk-in freezer.
- $500 for an upgraded food safety certificate. My current one was free and mostly covers food storage issues and basic health concerns. I'll need a better one for prepared food.
- $10k to bribe the local health officer into "looking the other way" as to exceeding the maximum occupancy of the rooms we operate in. Keep in mind that the local health inspector also happens to be the chief of police, so it's really $5k to bribe the health inspector and another $5k for the chief to ignore the fact that we just bribed the health inspector.
- We shouldn't be using donated food or food obtained from the Food Bank or USDA for those who don't meet income and residency qualifications. We also shouldn't be using funds for that. So, you'll need to bring enough squirrels to feed your entire party, as it will be the only thing on the menu. We will not be providing vegetarian or vegan options because we're a food pantry, not a restaurant. Besides, roadkill has a veritable bouquet of flavors which any alternative-diet eater will find convincing enough to cross over to the dark side of eating dead animals.

We hope that you can agree to our terms, and I want to assure you that we will be more than happy to process these exceptionally large credit card transactions with an anonymous someone from the internet who can't tell the difference between a food pantry and a restaurant. I look forward to the joy I'll feel as we discover that the real credit card holder has charged back the transaction, and the funds you asked us to forward to someone else now has to come out of our pocket. You should know that it would effectively shut down the food pantry for good and abandon the four of the five towns we service. Making people who live below the poverty line starve isn't very nice. It might even turn me psychotic and in the event that that happens, you can rest assured that you will be eating squirrel I scraped off the road. Every squirrel between me and you, no matter how "ripe" it happens to be.

Have a lovely evening, and you may want to practice picking fur out of your teeth.

We should totally pass a law that makes scammers eat roadkill. Hey, their victims feel like it, so why not make them see what that tastes like. Either that, or the team from Leverage needs to figure out how to franchise.

[Imalawman]

Ha, nice.