A few months ago, I was answer­ing dozens of Craigslist ads a day to try and find any work I could includ­ing paid sur­veys and research set­tings. In the fury of it all, I acci­den­tally involved myself in a mail fraud scheme by respond­ing to a spam mes­sage I mis­took as a real response to one of my inquiries to a paid sur­vey. Every­thing looked very con­vinc­ing and authen­tic to the point I almost unknow­ingly com­mit­ted a crime by try­ing to cash coun­ter­feit postal money orders. Luck­ily, I caught on in time, called my local FBI field office, and filed a com­plaint to the Inter­net Crime Com­plaint Cen­ter (IC3).

One of the prob­lems I found in get­ting replies after inquir­ing about a Craigslist list­ing is that you don’t get a response from the Craigslist gen­er­ated email address (i.e. gigs-yvmsq-1541740782@craigslist.org) you orig­i­nally emailed. I also found that most peo­ple didn’t keep the same sub­ject line and didn’t include what I orig­i­nally wrote which is what made this scam so hard to spot. If I hadn’t been answer­ing so many dif­fer­ent ads and hadn’t actu­ally been look­ing for Craigslist paid sur­veys, I would have imme­di­ately marked this as spam. Here’s what the email said:

Craigslist Paid Survey

Dear Appli­cant

Thank you for your recent online appli­ca­tion on Craigslist dated 3rd Novem­ber, 2009. We appre­ci­ate your quick response as we believe it por­trays good sense of respon­si­bil­ity and efficiency.

We are a dynamic Orga­ni­za­tion Devel­op­ment and Man­age­ment Con­sult­ing firm involved in help­ing Com­pa­nies achieve mar­ket lead­er­ship and Improve con­nec­tions between pro­fes­sional ser­vices firms and their client orga­ni­za­tion. Our com­pany is cur­rently con­duct­ing a sur­vey on Money Gram Out­lets to help mea­sure and improve effec­tive­ness of the ser­vices they pro­vide to the gen­eral pub­lic. This is as a result of com­plaints from some of Money Gram reli­able cus­tomers about the behav­ior and order­li­ness of most Money Gram outlets.

The sur­vey involves you vis­it­ing a Money Gram Out­let in your area to patron­ize their busi­ness ser­vices as a cus­tomer and give us feed­back on your over­all cus­tomer expe­ri­ence by fill­ing a sim­ple online ques­tion­naire. Each sur­vey takes a max­i­mum of 20 Min­utes to com­plete and you’ll be paid $85 for every sur­vey com­pleted, No Sales Involved and this will not incon­ve­nience your present occupation.

If you are inter­ested in par­tic­i­pat­ing, please send us a reply with your Full Name & Email Address, we’ll get back to you after receiv­ing this infor­ma­tion to con­firm your par­tic­i­pa­tion in the survey.

Your faith­fully,

Terry Schultz

Research Ana­lyst

RSM Research

14621 Firethorne Path

Fort Wayne IN 46814

260–494-3832

It’s a pretty legit sound­ing email and they end it with only need­ing my email address and full name (noth­ing too per­sonal and come to think of it they should already have it if I responded in the first place). I will­ingly responded and a few days later got this very real look­ing email:

Sur­vey Date

Good Morn­ing,

This is to con­firm you have been selected as our Sur­vey / Eval­u­a­tion agent in your area. You will be eval­u­at­ing Money Gram out­lets in your neigh­bor­hood and the sur­vey date is Novem­ber 13, 2009.

Please note that you will be required to visit one Money Gram out­let within your neigh­bor­hood to patron­ize their busi­ness ser­vices as a cus­tomer and give us feed­back on your over­all cus­tomer expe­ri­ence with them by com­plet­ing a questionnaire.

Funds to cover all expenses needed to con­duct this sur­vey will be deliv­ered to you on the sur­vey­date by USPS. Deduct your com­pen­sa­tion of $85 after receiv­ing the funds and pro­ceed to the near­est Money Gram with the remain­der of the funds to com­plete the actual sur­vey eval­u­a­tion, fur­ther infor­ma­tion on how to pro­ceed will be emailed to you on the survey date.

Respond ASAP to this email on your accep­tance and will­ing­ness to carry out the sur­vey with your Full Name, Mail­ing Address, Phone Num­ber where the funds and guide­line to com­plet­ing the sur­veyshould be mailed to.

Thank you and hope to hear from you today.

Your faith­fully,

Terry Schultz
Research Ana­lyst

RSM Research
14621 Firethorne Path
Fort Wayne IN 46814
260–494-3832

I gave out my address and my Google Voice num­ber. (I don’t con­sider my apart­ment that I don’t have long term plans of stay­ing at very sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion and my Google Voice num­ber isn’t real either since it just for­wards to a num­ber of my choos­ing.) Now a flag should have started to go up when I didn’t hear any­thing after a few emails, but then an update came a week later.

Money Gram Sur­vey Update

Good Morn­ing,

We apol­o­gize for the post­pone­ment in the sur­vey date, it was due to a logis­tic arrange­ments error by our courier. The sur­vey funds will  be deliv­ered today or tomor­row by USPS. Fol­low the below instruc­tions to com­plete the Eval­u­a­tion as soon as you receive the funds.

Attached below is the Money Gram form, study the ques­tions care­fully before con­duct­ing the actu­al­sur­vey on Money Gram and have the form filled out and emailed back to me after com­ple­tion of thesurvey.

1.1 Write your Name & Address on the pay to Col­umn of the Money Orders and fill in the return name and address on the pack­age on the Sender Col­umn before cash­ing them at your bank.

1.2 Deduct your pay of $85 after cash­ing the Money Orders.
1.3 Deduct another $65 for trans­fer fees.

Locate a Money Gram Out­let near you to con­duct the sur­vey by patron­iz­ing their busi­ness ser­vices, you are to appear as a poten­tial cus­tomer mak­ing a Money Gram trans­fer to a rel­a­tive out­side the coun­try. Below is the trans­fer infor­ma­tion you need for the wire.

Trans­fer Amount : $1650
Receivers Last Name: Adams
Receivers First Name: Jonathan
Des­ti­na­tion: Pre­to­ria, South Africa 0180

Be sure to observe how long it took you to get ser­vices, Smart­ness of the atten­dant and Cus­tomer ser­vice pro­fes­sion­al­ism dur­ing the trans­fer process and Under no cir­cum­stances should the Money Gram Agents know this eval­u­a­tion is being car­ried out on them.

Email me as soon as you make the trans­fer with the fol­low­ing infor­ma­tion;
Ref­er­ence #, Amount Sent, Name And Address Of Sender.

Thank you and get back to me as soon as the sur­vey is com­pleted today.

Your faith­fully,

Terry Schultz

This is about the point where all my flags went up that this had all been a scam when I saw they wanted me to send money to South Africa. I have noth­ing against South Africa, but when you’re on the same con­ti­nent as Nige­ria you become scam­mers by asso­ci­a­tion. It also didn’t add up why a com­pany in Fort Wayne, Indi­ana would have me send funds to a dif­fer­ent con­ti­nent. I marked this email as spam and moved on with my life.

That is until I received an overnighted USPS enve­lope the next day with two postal money orders inside total­ing $1925. The scam plot con­tin­ued to thicken as both  money orders were from a Cary Ross in New York City but the enve­lope was sent from Carla Killeen in Joshua, Texas.

I ini­tially thought, “Oh no, some poor woman has been scammed! But maybe I can get her her money back…” I did some googling to see if I could find any infor­ma­tion about either sender. Unfor­tu­nately, I didn’t find much. The NY address was for an apart­ment build­ing and the TX address was out in the mid­dle of nowhere. Nei­ther name returned any­thing in either city or state either so I was stuck.

In my frus­tra­tion, I started exam­in­ing the postal money orders and noticed how cheap they looked. I had never seen or used one in my life, but have seen some coun­ter­feit money and fake IDs in my time. I quickly brought up the postal money order secu­rity fea­tures and saw the Ben Franklin water­marks were miss­ing and that the ver­ti­cal thread looked more stamped on than weaved. To con­firm my sus­pi­cions, I called the US Postal Money Orders hot­line (1–866-459– 7822) and entered the ser­ial num­bers, amounts, and ID to ver­ify they were fake.

This is the point where I could have just walked away, but I fig­ured that these scam­mers had wasted enough of my time that I could try to turn them in some­how so I called my local FBI field office. A few sec­onds into my story, they cut me off and knew exactly what I was about to tell them. In true gov­ern­ment fash­ion, I was told to visit http://www.ic3.gov and file a com­plaint and to keep the fake money orders as evidence.

Like I already said, if I hadn’t been answer­ing so many craigslist posts this would have never hap­pened. I wanted to post their emails ver­ba­tim so search engines could index them incase other peo­ple get them. When I was search­ing for infor­ma­tion about the NY and TX res­i­dences, I found out that the first email I received was a scam but it didn’t look like any­one had become as involved as I did.

Noth­ing ever came of my com­plaint (not a big sur­prise). I’m glad some­one didn’t get scammed out of any real money. I’m REALLY glad I didn’t try to cash those fake money orders. I hope some­one finds this post before they get involved in a dumb scam or can at least get out of it if they are already involved. In clos­ing, here’s some tips from the United States Postal Ser­vice for pro­tect­ing your­self against money order fraud.