An acquaintance of mine, a music teacher, was recently contacted by someone to provided saxophone lessons for a foreign student. There were enough odd elements in the email to spark some concern and he thought to get me involved. Good thing because it was an absolute scam!
Here’s what the original email said (with personal identifiers of the recipient removed for his privacy):
Hello,
I'm Mrs Debbie Mann from Paris,France.during my search for a Saxophone instrument lesson teacher that would always take my son ( Chris ) and I found you..Your advert looks great and it is very okay to me since you specialize in the area i am seeking for him... My Son would be coming to US (your city) Before the end of this month for a period of time and with his friend for 2 Months.he is just a beginner and he is 16 years old, i want you to help me teach lesson during his stay. So, kindly let me know your charges cost per week's ,in order for me to arrange for his payment before he travels down to your side. I have also made preparation for his personal equipment he will be using privately at home after the lesson during his stay.
Please Advise back on;
(1). your charges per 1 hour twice a week for 2 Months?
(2).The Day and time you will be available to teach him During the week?
(3).Tuition address?
I will be looking forward to read from you soonest.
Best Regards,
Mrs Debbie Mann
There are many elements that should strike you as unusual. For example, the cut-and-paste quality of the writing is purposefully vague. Note the missing personal salutation. It just says “Hello”, not “Dear Mr. Smith.” The writer claims to be from France so we can excuse the unusual syntax and word choices as those of a foreign correspondent. But then note the lack of explicit information and the use of the word “your city”, “this month”, “his friend”, “your side”, and “personal equipment”. Except for the single use of the word “Saxophone” there is nothing to indicate the writer has any knowledge of the teacher’s location, particular location within the city, type of lessons, or other elements that a parent writing such an unusual request might provide.
Other things that would catch my eye are the strange capitalizations within the sentence, such as the word “Month” and the word “During”. They don’t do that in French, though they might in other languages. This all leads me to believe that this is not a letter written by a French speaker, that the questions asked and information provided seem really strange and if I were this parent, I would probably want a lot more information about the teacher in this far off land who might be spending many hours with my son.
Based on these observations, and my previous knowledge of similar scams, I turned to my trusty investigator’s tool, the Internet. There, with a quick web search, I found many mentions of this scam and this particular “Mrs Debbie Mann.” Here’s one thread on a website called Violinist.com. These scams are so common, so well known that there’s a warning posted on the Suzuki Association website from 2007.
My music teacher acquaintance didn’t immediately realize it was a scam until he got back a reply to his email that contained the requested dates, rates and other information. He then received this from Debbie Mann:
Concerning the payment arrangement, i assure you that would not be a problem because one of my Husband business associates in USA would be paying on my behalf and i had already spoken with him about this and he said that would not be a problem that i should let him know when everything has been arranged so that he could issue you a check with excess money and deduct your own 2 month total cost and have the rest send to my Caretaker Chris.
Ah. There’s the classic bit. They want to send you “excess money” and then you issue your own check to send to Chris’ caretaker. You may receive a check, but in these scams they are bogus. The government’s IC3.gov website has a page about how this works. Your bank may put the funds into your account initially but after several days, perhaps a couple of weeks the scam is revealed, the funds then removed from your account. You’ll even get hit for a bounced check fee. And, oh yes, you’ve lost the amount you sent over to Caretaker Chris.
There’s really only one thing to do with these scamsters and that’s report them. Please let the US government know and report this and other internet crimes to www.ic3.gov.