The story of a (failed) scam

It started with a simple Facebook message. Somebody was interested in our cupcakes (always nice to know) and wanted a price for a dozen. A dozen! Very nice.

So we provided the price and asked a few questions, and the person said they were local and would like to collect. Not only that but they wanted 4 dozen. A very nice order indeed.

But even here there were some odd things that made us a bit wary. The person had a locked profile with almost no friends. The responses to questions were either vague or rather peculiar - not typical of someone local to us. All the same this person offered to pay a deposit and gave us an order date.

That's when the attempted scam played out.

The person claimed to have paid us by PayPal but we had no payment. "Check your junk" they said, "The details may be in there". So we checked the junk mail and sure enough there was an email saying that a payment had failed.

BIG RED ALARM BELLS.

Reading the email further, the scam was obvious - they (alleging to be PayPal) wanted a £450 "deposit" to release the funds, which would then be refunded to us. This was an attempt to scam us, a very small business, out of £450.

Obviously we didn't pay and we reported the profile and blocked the sender. But it all goes to show that even very small businesses are not immune. There are those who are willing to seek out anybody who they think they can trick into paying. We have no idea why they chose us specifically, who they actually are or where they are based, but thankfully we were alert enough not to fall for it.

Our own tips/hints on this are:

• Language - does the communication seem a bit strange and unnatural?

  
  

• Identity - can you genuinely identify who they are or is their information missing or hidden?

  
  

• Validation - are they vague and evasive when you ask clarifying questions?

  
  

• Requests - are they asking you to pay out money or give up information which seems wrong?

  
  

• Route - do they take unusual routes to order such as avoiding your online store or using emails that go to your junk/spam?

The warning signs are all there, it's just a matter of being vigilant. Be careful everyone.