Thank you!!
This suggest that these are real checks.
If the banks process these checks it would seem that these scammers actually have money in a bank and their money is being used to cover these checks.
How are they managing to scam money if they are giving money away? Are these checks for only a few cents?
The majority of Americans do not have great quantities of cash sitting in their bank accounts for these people to loot.
There must be something to this scam I am missing.
Go to one of those instant cash places that give payday loans. You’ll pay a huge percentage in their fees. Chances are you will not have to divulge anymore than your name to cash it. The scammers that sent it to you already have that. Keep the envelope it was sent in to prove it was mailed to you and you never created it.
I talked with my banker a few days back, she said there are so many ways scammers are passing bad checks they have a hard time keeping their tellers educated on it.
The verification link might have been disabled by our own government (I hope).
Here is a different page from Treasury that has some subtle differences from the linky you provided: https://www.treasury.gov/services/Pages/Treasury-Payments.aspx
I got a call from my “Local Sheriff’s Department” asking for a donation. I thanked them for the reminder and said I’d just hand it to the Sheriff next time I saw him at the pistol range and save postage. They hung up. I did a reverse look up on the phone # and it came up as an escort service in Chicago. I guess they’re diversifying.
There is a related scam of the IRS sending real checks for a small amount so they can identify bank accounts to seize before they give notice of a tax problem they’ve created.
It may be used only against those who are visible Republicans. (The administration still hasn’t gotten around to cleaning up the IRS).
There are several variations of it, some say it’s a work from home opportunity processing US shipments and or printing and mailing invoices for a European or Asian company and some say it’s for a “logistics manager” or for a “re-shipper”.
Here’s an example:
But what they do is “hire” you after a couple of emails having been exchanged, but of course by now they have gotten your personal information by having you complete an application and W-4 such as your SSN, DOB, job and address history and banking information for direct depositing your pay.
But in this scam some will also often tell you that you have to purchase a specific type of printer and envelopes, mailing labels, boxes and other supplies, but say the will reimburse you upfront. So they send you a check, but a check for way more than their list of supplies actually costs. They then tell you to return to them, often via a money gram, the difference between the amount of the check they sent and what you actually spent and give you only a couple of days to make the purchases, send them the receipt and the money gram for the difference.
But the check is often drawn from a bogus account or from a foreign bank. The victim deposits the scammer’s check and draws funds from their own account for the difference before the victim’s bank figures out the deposited check is no good which can sometimes take a week or two.
The scammer now has the cash the victim sent via the money gram and also has the victim’s personal information that they can either sell to others or use themselves for identity theft.
FWIW my brother had prior experience working in a state agency’s print shop and for a printing company but after his wife company closed their office in MD and transferred her to their NJ location, my brother was out of work and posted his resume to several job search sites.
He called his daughter all excited to tell her about this great work from home job he had been offered but she was immediately suspicious that it sounded like a scam. But my brother didn’t believe her at first. So she called her brother and me and we all did research and we all called my brother telling him that it was a scam, I and his son both emailed him links to others who had been ripped off scammed by this very same scam and begged him not to give them any personal information or cash their check if sent to him.
My brother was a bit embarrassed at first but then thanked us and fortunately he hadn’t send them any personal information and when they sent him their bogus check, he took it to the local post office to the postal inspector. Not that anything may have resulted from that as these scammers are very slick and hard to track down.