How stupid do these people think we are? Okay, well at least I'm not that stupid.

I have an ad on craigslist for a vacation rental - I've got points in my wyndham timeshare account to use up this year.

Anyway, I had some interest from a guy in going to Daytona Beach the week of Labor Day, so I checked availability (amazingly, still some availability left!) and gave him a quote.

After exchanging a few emails, I got this response from him:

Hey

I have receive the confirmation from my secretary that the payment as
been issued out and was mailed by the courier company. It will be
delivered to your address a day from now according to the courier, but
to my greatest surprise the draft was issued out to the sum of $2850
instead of the actual cost of our stay . She claimed that i requested
for that amount to be issued out to you but am very sure i only made a
request for just the cost of our stay. This is a terrible mistake and
i was just informed about this so please once the check is delivered
please take it to your Bank and have it cashed You will then deduct
the cost of our stay plus an extra $50 to offset the cost of your run
around expenses. The rest of the fund should be sent to my travel
Agent via a Cash Transfer outlet the same day you receive the payment
so that travel Agent can book our tickets and Car hire service at
once.

**I will need your immediate response via email assuring me that i can
trust you to handle this with utmost care and have the remaining fund
returned appropriately as requested and will hope that your intentions
remains noble though out the duration of this transaction**

Thanks for your anticipated support.

Yeah, sure, I'm gonna cash your counterfeit check, and send you the extra $2000.

If I actually do get a check from this dude I'm calling the FBI.

Sometimes, I'm thankful for American Express.

I recently made a purchase of Doom3 on eBay for 99 cents plus shipping.  The total amount was $7.99.  The description was very specific about what's included - only the CD is guaranteed, and they are not tested, and the items are sold as is.  They only check for the CD, they said.

So I figure, for $8, if they ship me the Doom CD-ROM with no registration code, fine, it'll be $8 lost.

Instead, I got the box, the registration code, the manual.... and two copies of Disk 2, along with one copy of disk 3, and no copies of disk 1 or disk 4.

swdiscounters FRAUD!

They of course refused to do anything about it.   In my opinion, they failed to ship the listed product, and so they're committing fraud on ebay.

At any rate, I was suspicious up front, so just in case I paid for the item with my American Express card.

After attemping to get swdiscounters to either refund my money or ship me the missing CDs, which they refused to do, I contacted American Express, and they kindly refunded my money.

which means they took the $7.99 away from swdiscounters.

I love my American Express.  This is exactly why I use it for almost everything.

This has legitimate fraud potential, and you can verify it at snopes.com.

Here's a new twist scammers are using to commit identity theft: the jury duty scam. Here's how it works:

The scammer calls claiming to work for the local court and claims you've failed to report for jury duty. He tells you that a warrant has been issued for your arrest.

The victim will often rightly claim they never received the jury duty notification. The scammer then asks the victim for confidential information for "verification" purposes.

Specifically, the scammer asks for the victim's Social Security number, birth date, and sometimes even for credit card numbers and other private information — exactly what the scammer needs to commit identity theft.

So far, this jury duty scam has been reported in Michigan, Ohio, Texas, Arizona, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Oregon and Washington state.

It's easy to see why this works. The victim is clearly caught off guard, and is understandably upset at the prospect of a warrant being issued for his or her arrest. So, the victim is much less likely to be vigilant about protecting their confidential information.

In reality, court workers will never call you to ask for social security numbers and other private information. In fact, most courts follow up via snail mail and rarely, if ever, call prospective jurors.

Action: Never give out your Social Security number, credit card numbers or other personal confidential information when you receive a telephone call.

This jury duty scam is the latest in a series of identity theft scams where scammers use the phone to try to get people to reveal their Social Security number, credit card numbers or other personal confidential information.

It doesn't matter *why* they are calling — all the reasons are just different variants of the same scam.

Protecting yourself is simple: Never give this info out when you receive a phone call.