It’s embarrassing to admit, but I got scammed a while ago. I twigged reasonably quickly what was going on, tho, and decided to draw the experience out to see what my scammer was up to and how it would play out. Not sure if my scammer figured out he’d been rumbled, because things just fizzled out around the time they should’ve got juicy, so there’s no big payoff at the end. (I’ll save you the trouble of reading and being disappointed!) Here’s the story and the lessons learned so that someone else might avoid any financial/time losses in future.

First contact and negotiations

On February 28, I received the following message by email, with 3 documents attached:

Greetings!

I’m Steven Charles from Greenville,South Carolina and i’ll be leaving here in Greenville for the United Kingdom on a business trip in the next couple of days.However,I will need your service to proofread some documents for me.I need to make a presentation to some groups of people in London,United Kingdom on 11th of April,2016.I will need you to help me proofread the papers before printing copies of the documents.I will also need that the work be delivered by/before April 8,2016.Please,let me know your rate for the project(see attachments) .I look forward to hearing back from you soon.
Best Regards,

Steven

Most of my work comes through personal referrals, so I was slightly iffy about the request: where had he got my details (presumably my website or from one of the editing sites I’m listed on), why had he picked me (some of the materials were finance-related, and I’ve written and edited financial docs before, maybe he’s seen some of my work, or herd of me through an ex-colleague and neglected to mention it?), and how did I feel about disclosing my details to him if it turned out he was a scammer (my address and phone no are already in the public domain, and I could always insist on payment by PayPal so I didn’t divulge my bank details). 

The language in the email wasn’t great, but the attached docs were of a higher standard, so I was willing to bet that it had been co-authored with someone with a higher standard of English, or had already been edited once, then revised. I didn’t need the work, but the project was small, and I had a few day coming up, and I would have to bite the bullet and deal with strangers as clients at some point, so I figured I might as well quote high and see how it went.

Steven replied promptly with:

I am happy with your proposal and thanks for the reply, I forgot to attach one of the files that need to be proofread.Please see attached the ommitted file and let me know the new total.

The additional file doubled the project word count, but was still manageable. I confirmed when I’d have availability. 

Next message:

Thanks for the follow up.The rate is fine with me and i will like to proceed with the project. Please provide me with your payment name,mailing address and contact phone number so i can instruct my US associate sent out payment to you inform of a bank check asap.I look forward to hearing back from you.Have a wonderful day.

Regards,

Steven

Woah! This guy’s keen! Sending out a cheque before he’s even seen the work? He’s lucky he hired such an honest editor. Or he’s up to something… He didn’t ask for my bank details, which made me a little more relaxed, but cheques could bounce, and I’d be charged. I replied with an offer of a PayPal invoice, and got back:

Gotcha, Thank you very much. The check will be more convenient for me.

The project

So, the appointed editing day arrived and I sat down to work. The docs were of mixed quality, on financial and HR topics. One looked like a copy-and-paste from a slide show, and was missing associated formatting (I’d asked for a copy of the original slides in my initial reply but they were never provided, so I annotated my edit to indicate what assumptions I’d made about bullet levels and nesting, etc.). Another looked like a subset of sections from a thesis — I guessed Steven was aiming to keep costs down by sending excerpts rather than a full doc, so I noted in my edit where the doc seemed to refer to info that wasn’t in the doc, and recommended cross checks against the original. The long document was a bit of a crazed rant about financial models and theories the author disputed. By the time I was done with that, I was pretty sure I’d be telling Steven I was too busy to edit any more of his docs, and was forming theories as to why a previous editor might’ve cut him loose.

I submitted the docs with a page of notes and disclaimer around unclear/missing information, with a strong recommendation that he review all proposed edits before accepting them, in case he was a looney on the look out for someone to sue. 

Again, the reply was quick and brief:

Yes, thank you very much, exactly the way i want it. 

Grand job. All done. Invoice at the end of the month, and draw a line under the experience, I thought to myself.

Smelling rats

The next day (what timing!), I learned that a couple of fellow editors had received identical requests for editing from “my” Steven. And (weirdly) their requests had come after he’d already confirmed he wanted to go ahead with me. One colleague had been asked for bank details, and declined; another felt Steven sounded like an awkward customer, so deleted the request. I let them know that muggins here had agreed to the edit, and warned that if anyone else was approached, the work was done, so he was definitely up to something iffy. 

I sent a polite email to Steven enquiring what event he would be attending in London, as from his docs, it sounded like it would be very interesting. The reply:

Thanks for the follow up. I’m attending a conference. I will let you know as soon as the payment is on the way..

Regards

Steven.

“A conference”, eh, Steven? That’s a bit vague. Who and where was this guy really? His address was a gmail one, so I couldn’t tell anything about him from the headers.

My next message was a nice straightforward list of verifiable personal details that would be needed for his invoice, and a repeated offer of a PayPal invoice for his convenience. I was really looking forward to that reply, and was half surprised when it actually did appear:

Mr Steven Dirrel Charles.

XXXX Roper Mountain Rd, Greenville, SC 29615.

My phone number is (803) XXX-4556.

I want the project to be finished before 8th of April.

I’m presenting it to Business Manager, Representatives…

You don’t need to send me a copy okay. Paying via check would be convenient for me as well. Thank you for getting back to me. Let me know the total cost of all asap so that i instruct my US associate sent out payment to you inform of a bank check asap.I look forward to hearing back from you.Have a wonderful day.

Hang on – you “want the project to be finished before 8th of April” — did I not already do that?  Or have you lost track of which victim you’re talking to? (One of my colleagues had noted that Steven never addresses his mail recipients by name.) Also, “You don’t need to send me a copy okay”? Who doesn’t want a detailed invoice before parting with their hard earned cash?

Anyway – personal details obtained, I started investigating. I checked out the address on Google maps first: it’s real, sort of — it’s for a 300+ unit complex, and he doesn’t quote a house/apartment. Further googling found a website (http://www.spokeo.com/) that listed residents at the complex (names, unit numbers, and sometimes phone numbers) — Steven wasn’t on the list. Most didn’t have phone numbers, but the ones that did had a different area code to the one Steven had provided. A bit more digging, with the assistance of a US-based contact, turned up that the area code provided neighboured the one for the complex. I didn’t think it was worth spending any money checking who would answer the phone — I was pretty sure it would either fail, or “Steven” would be ready to spin me a tale. 

By now, Dave’s interest was sufficiently piqued and he came up with the idea of invoicing via a downloadable PDF so that we could trace where exactly Steven was. So, I put together an invoice with no more info about me than he already had, and put it for download on a dedicated website Dave put up just for this purpose, so we’d have no doubt that whoever accessed it was Steven. A couple of hours later, and we had our man: a genuine Nigerian scammer visiting from Nigeria. I was sad he hadn’t claimed to be a prince while he was at it.

And that’s when it all fizzled out. I expected things to pan out with a fake cheque for more than the project cost arriving in the mail, followed by a request to send him the “change” by some irreversible means, then the fake cheque would bounce, and I’d be left out of pocket, but nothing more happened. A few reminder/late payment notices were sent, but no reply received.

Lessons learned

So, in future, a more cautious me will be doing the following:

• Requesting full, verifiable client contact details before starting any project – going to have to ask at some point, might as well find out early if they’re unwilling to share
• Requesting payment by PayPal from new clients – possibly requesting a deposit up front to make sure that this channel will work reliably when the time comes
• Requesting phased payments for larger projects rather than waiting till the end – at least this was a small project and I didn’t lose too much time or money (but “not too much” is still greater than “none”)
• Not inconveniencing myself, existing clients, or friends and family to make time for a project for a new client who’s an unknown quantity – if I know you and love you, I’ll do everything in my power to meet your deadline, but if we’ve never done business before, that’s asking too much
• Searching for matches to already-published content before I start editing – I actually frequently do this, and have no idea why I didn’t this time, especially when the content was obviously incomplete or taken from another source/format

So, if you’ve made it this far, I hope you’ve found the story useful/entertaining. Have you been similarly scammed, or had a near miss? Any other lessons I should be learning/implementing? Please share in the comments!