Yeah, my undergrad institution used SSN as student ID. One of my buddies had a roommate who was as asshole, so we got his SSN while he was out of the room and used it to dis-enroll him from all of his classes. He didn’t find out until the end of the semester when he didn’t get any grades.
Oh nooooo that is so mean.
But funny. Hey, 18 year olds are all assholes, right?
Yeah the NYU email addresses used… the last 4… of your SSN…
Oh, neat, so mine would have been cornchip0922?
If your name was Tom Jones it would have been [email protected]
I don’t remember how they would have dealt with collisions… IIRC people without a middle name got a Q in the middle but I’m not sure.
I have a government email account. They use your name, with initials and periods. Probably a couple times a week there are phishing and scam emails that show up in my account. How weird is it to try a scam the US governments system? I assume the scammers are just doing random shit and somehow the right combinations show up. Either that or they have already breached the index with all the email addresses, which is available on the email account.
PSA: I think I’ve posted this before, but cashier’s checks are the bread and butter of scammers. Essentially they can get one, give it to you, cancel it, and it will be weeks before the banks are aware. Main scam I ran across was a girlfriend who was a photographer, the scam was that they would buy a 2k item, “erroneously” send you a 5k cashier’s check, and ask for the difference back. Two weeks later that check is worthless.
Many people, especially young people who aren’t terribly familiar with checks along with the generally naive, don’t understand that just because a check has the words “Cashier’s Check” printed on it doesn’t make the thing an actual cashier’s check. When in doubt, take the damn thing to your bank and ask them to try and validate it for you (and bring along any associated documentation you got along with it, like a letter, especially if the letter says to not tell anyone at the bank what you’re doing).
Too many kids just don’t understand checks and think they’re automatically legit.
Excellent advice.
I guess the best way is to make an even better appeal to their profit motive. (I.e. “Check won’t clear, no money kid.”)
That [expensive device] you bought better make you money. 'Cause you have to pay it all back. Or jail. You decide.
Those are like three things. Whose kid considers three things at the same time?
This is bad advice – the bank teller may not be able to tell immediately, depending on how it was faked. They will give you the cash, and only reverse the transaction a couple weeks later when there are no funds. The best policy is just to never accept them from anyone you don’t already know.
Michael warned the teller that he thought the check might be fake, and even asked for them to put the money on hold while they verified it, but the bank staff reassured him and immediately gave him the required cash. The supposed student had asked Michael to deposit the cash in another bank account that Michael did not own. Soon after, the original bank said that the check was fake and asked for the money back, putting Michael out more than $2,000. “How are the banks not ready for this?” he says. “I literally went into my bank and said ‘This is fake, I want a hold on it.’ And they weren’t interested in doing that.”
I’ll accept that it’s incomplete advice in the sense that I didn’t write a beginning-to-end guide to how to avoid fraud, but I didn’t say “if the teller says it looks okay, you should immediately hand a pile of money to someone you don’t know”. It’s all still the presenter’s responsibility at the end of the day, and it’s pretty obviously a bad idea to dole out a pile of money to someone you don’t know based on the absurdly stupid idea that they actually sent you more money than was necessary in the hope that you would be kind enough to send the excess back.
If I actually need to spell all that out the next time, I’ll be sure to do so.
You said that if in doubt, you should take it to the bank and have them try and validate it. This accomplishes nothing other than giving you a false feeling of security. Even if the bank says the check is valid, they can still come back two weeks later and say “whoops, it wasn’t valid after all, and we’re taking the money back out of your account”. Even if you didn’t hand out a pile of cash, you’re still going to be pissed if you were selling something and it’s long gone by the time the fraud is discovered.
Sure, going to the bank isn’t as bad as just blindly accepting a check and assuming it’s valid, because at least there’s some chance that the bank catches the scam or talks the person out of it. But these scams are predicated on people trusting that the bank will catch any fakes, and that it’s ok to proceed with the transaction once the bank clears it. For example, I recently sold a GPU on craigslist, and got a bunch of replies along these lines:
I’m satisfied with the price and the condition on the list, kindly withdraw the advert from list and considered it sold. I would have loved to come and take a look and purchase with cash but due to the Corona virus social distancing I will add extra $70 with the original price while you remove the ads. I will overnight a Cashier Check/ Certified Check to you and I will make the pick up arrangement as soon as you have the check clear and you have your cash,
So your advice is to do exactly what the scammer wants. Again, the only good policy when it comes to cashiers’ checks from people you don’t know is not to even consider accepting them in the first place.
How did you respond to all of these if you don’t mind me asking? And is Paypal still an acceptable answer or are there still reverse charge scams there?
The first one I still had some tiny doubt about whether they were a scammer, so I replied with a nice message explaining that cashiers’ checks are considered unsafe, and that I’d only be willing to take cash. Never heard back from them, of course.
As these messages kept coming in, I just updated the listing to say very prominently “cash exchange in public setting only – all other inquiries will be ignored”, and didn’t respond to anybody else who mentioned cashier’s checks.
I think Paypal is a bit safer because a scammer would have to go to the trouble of filing a claim with their support that you could reply to and try to get the transaction reversed. It could still happen, if they claim they never received whatever you were selling and it’s your word against theirs. It’s probably the safest option if you’re selling something online and can’t meet in person though.
He’s right, the underlying genius of the scam is that a bank will happily deposit the check into your account, and then two weeks later take it back when it fails to go through. Never a cashier’s check.
Yeah, this taught me to never treat checks as real money until it clears. Had it patiently explained to me at the bank and then told the story to other folks who basically told me “it’s a scam”. Real folks will just write checks for the right amount, anything else is a big red flag.
I forward a phone number from Canada to my US cell phone and I’ve gotten lots of pretty hilarious “sheriffs from the Canadian Revenue Service are standing by to collect your taxes” (I’d actually love to meet fellow Canadians in Missouri!), lots of offers to pay off loans I don’t have, and recently there’s something involving packages in foreign language which I will happily pretend to not understand at all.