Singapore order....maybe

J

John R. Fraps

Joined
Mar 10, 2000
Messages
1,146
Anyone familiar with this "potential buyer"?

"From: "merpati" <merpati@kenthuonline.com>

Dear Sir or Madam,

I am looking for Knives Product,
But Before I continue my order, I have some question below :

1. Can you Ship to Singapore ?
2. Do you accept major credit card as the payment ?
3. Do you use shipping method for FedEx or UPS freight service?

Please confirm me with your availability and price information of the products.
Looking forwards to doing bussines with you. Thank's in advance.

Best Regards,
Dennis Hill
Singapore"

If not, Beware!
 
I Think that if there were no grammatical errors then It would look less suspicious.
 
Dear Sir or Madam?

Sounds like spam, looking to find the one sucker in a thousand who'll finance his next vacation. He's not writing to one specific person with a serious order.

Keith H is right ... someone with an English name should know English better.
 
John what about this part (If not, Beware!) ? that is weird whole thing just sounds
like a con .
 
You cannot simply dismiss the prospect of developing a new customer but there are more secure methods of ensuring payment than accepting a credit card. I generally ask for bank wire transfer instead of credit card payment and delay the shipment until the wire transfer has cleared completely.

I am dealing with someone now supposedly from Australia but the phone # is not working, the email address is gmail (google) and the email address seems a little odd. If the money comes up front OK the deal will go ahead.
 
ask him for some verification...

a phone #, an address and his CC info. you can always ask the bank to check/verify. His CC info should tally with his shipping address.

the grammar puts up a little redflag, as does the email address.
 
Hello,

First time poster, lurker for a while. Do NOT reply to this email from your email address. If you feel the need to reply then open an anonymous email account with any of the services out there and reply then. I fell for the same thing and replied with my regular email address, next thing I know (within 24 hours) I have 200 non deliverable emails all with misc. names in front of my @.com.

I am not too sure as to how it works, but I did a bit of research and seems as the proper terminology for this is Zombie. Supposedly, a virus is downloaded into your computer and can be activated at anytime and next thing you know you are sending out 10,000 pieces of SPAM using your good name.

I believe they have a different way of doing things now, though. I have run several different virus checkers on my computer with nothing. I emailed Comcast, my ISP, and Spamhaus.com to try to resolve this issue. For the past month or two, I haven't had any undeliverable emails sent back to my address.

Did this make sense? I am very tired after a long day at work and don't feel like proofreading this right now.:yawn:

Take care and hope this helps,
Rob
 
John,

I got the SAME e-mail this weekend.....

Contacted an established customer of mine in Singapore and he felt the same way as the other folks who have posted on this thread....

I did respond to the mail and specified either Paypal or a Western Union wire transfer...(unfortunately I did this before being directed to this post or I would not have even allowed the e-mail to come to my computer)

I have since purged my address book and will be running a full system virus/spyware scan this evening.

I'll let you know how that came out.
 
looking at the email again....it's definitely a scam / internet virus thing whatever....not knife collector/buyer/user uses the term "Knives Product"....that's like a metatag or something.....and the questions are very generic.

thanks for the insight.
 
Deep system scan came up clean.

I generally don't use grammar as a "flag" because I do a fair amount of business overseas and some languages don't lend themselves to easy translation...That said, I have indeed deleted and do not plan to allow any more correspondence from that address.

Yes, I may be loosing a potential customer (and some of my overseas clients are super people and have provided super support for my business :D), but my first thought with this one was to "do some checking".....

Take care all,
 
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