Another wonderful guest post coming from Sephy who provided this nice little bio:

I’ve been blogging on and off for a few years, but by far my current blog, Sephy’s Platzish, is the most consistent effort I’ve made at blogging. More recently, I have discovered social blogging sites such as BUMPzee and have created the US Blogs community there.

How to NOT make money on the Internet, plus tips for keeping safe out there.

It’s a common occurrence. You open your email, and see something similar to this:

COMPANY REPERESENTATIVE NEEDED(URGENT)
From the Desk of
Mr. Wu Ming Cheng
Director of Recruitment
CMEC HUBEI CO.
China.
www.cmec.com

Dear Sir/Madam,

I am Mr. Wu Ming Cheng, Director of Recruitment, Hubei Machinery, Equipment import & export Corporation (CMEC HUBEI CO.) We are a company who deal on Mechanical equipment, Hardware and minerals, Electrical products, Medical & Chemicals, Light industrial products and Office equipment and export into the Canada/America/UK and Europe.

We are searching for representatives who can help us establish a medium of getting to our costumers in the Canada/America and Europe as well as making payments through you to us.

Please if you are interested in serving as a link between our company and our customers in America /Canada we will be glad. Please contact us for more information. Subject to your satisfaction you will be given the opportunity to negotiate the mode of which we will pay for your services as our representative in Canada/America. If you are interested and willing to be of help, kindly acknowledge the receipt of this mail and send your reply to (wu_ming_cheng2000(at)yahoo.com.cn).

I want to assure you that this will be of no cost to you and there will be reward for the assistance you will render.

Thanks in advance

Mr. Wu Ming Cheng

It certainly appears promising, a job where you can work from home, even negotiate your method of payment and, best of all, is of no cost to you. You might even go to the website mentioned in the email. If you did visit the site, you would see that it is in Chinese and appears to be legitimate. Therefore, some of the grammatical and spelling errors in the text might make sense as this is a company in China. What would happen if you replied to this mail?

Within a day or two, you receive a response which says that you just need to give them your address and phone number in order to get things going with regards to working for them. Eventually, you receive notification that there is a customer ready to pay the company through you, and that you will need to confirm your contact information with them. A few days later, you receive a check in the mail from the customer and it contains a check – usually from a completely different company altogether, and for a large amount of money. At this stage, you may be somewhat suspicious of this, but still take the check to the bank as you have been told that you will receive a percentage – generally ten percent – of the check.

This is the point where the problems begin. If you are in the US, Federal law requires banks to make funds from checks available to you within a short period of time – generally two to five days. While you are waiting for the bank to make the funds available, you will be told that it is important that the money (less your “compensation”) is transferred to the company – by Western Union, MoneyGram or bank transfer – as soon as is possible. After some time, your bank will find out that the paying bank that the check was originally written on will not cover the cost of the check. At this point, you will be responsible for covering the entire cost of the check; additionally, you may find yourself facing legal problems relating to passing a fake check.

If you have been on the Internet for a long time, you may have recognized that Wu Ming Cheng’s email quoted above was a scam. You might wonder how someone could become a victim of this kind of scam. However, you need to take into account that not everyone knows the same things that you or I do. Thousands of people go onto the Internet for the first time every day, and many of them are using a computer for the first time as well. Many of the newcomers to the online world are older people who are more trusting than some of us who are younger, which makes them easier targets for scammers to swindle them out of their hard-earned life savings. An example of this comes from a story published in the New Yorker which chronicles how a psychotherapist managed to fall victim to various types of scams, including ones where he received fraudulent checks. In the end, it was his trusting of these scammers which has led him to spending time in a Federal prison after cashing these fake checks.

If you ever receive a mail that you are not certain is a scam, here are some pointers to assist you:

• Where did the mail come from? If it was sent from, or asks you to reply to, a free email provider such as Yahoo or Hotmail, it is most likely a scam.
• What are you being asked to do? Job scam emails, such as the one above, generally will ask you to fill a very generic role such as “Company Representative”, if a job title is mentioned at all.
• Does the language in the message make sense? Although I had mentioned that some language errors in a message from a Chinese company could be deemed acceptable, the reality is that if the actual company were contacting you, they would ensure that the language and especially the spelling would be correct. Note that in the message above, the word “REPERESENTATIVE” is spelled wrong and that the person who had written the email has confused the words “customer” and “costumer” at one point. In general, if the message contains many spelling and grammatical errors, it is likely a scam.
• Is there a sense of urgency in the mail? The one word that should pop out to you in the mail above is “URGENT”. If this were the real company contacting you, they would not tell you that the mail is Urgent. Most likely, there would be a deadline for filing an application or submitting a resume.

If you are still uncertain, you can use the Scam-O-Matic to check the mail. The site is able to tell you almost all the time if a mail is a scam email and is a very useful site. Also, any email addresses that are submitted as part of the scam mail are put onto a blacklist, and puts the content of the email on the internet for others who may have received the same mail to see that it is a scam.

Also, if you do receive an email that you suspect is a scam, treat it like any other spam that you may receive and do not reply to it. If you do, that tells the scammer that they have reached a valid email address and you may soon find yourself receiving many more scams via email. You might also think that sending them a note to unsubscribe or remove yourself from their list is useful, but it only does the same thing as replying to the mail – tells the scammer that your email is valid.

Some tips for keeping yourself safe out there

You may have seen some of these tips, and you may have not. Nevertheless, it never hurts to have a refresher of some simple ways of making sure you don’t find yourself facing Identity Theft or having your e-mail inundated by spam.

• Only give out personal information via email to people you know and trust.
• If you need to provide personal information, especially critical information such as Social Security or Tax ID numbers, through a website, make sure that it is a secure website. The easiest way to do this is to check the address bar. In most browsers, it will change color to indicate a secure connection; additionally, the site’s address will begin with “https://” instead of “http://”. You should also see a padlock in the address bar, status bar, or both.
• Only use your real details when you need to. This will probably seem extreme to many of you, and maybe it is, but this is something that I have been doing for a long time. In general, I never give a website my full name; if I can register without a name, address, etc. I will do it; if that information is required then I will use my initials along with a fake address and a zipcode in a different city to the one that I live in. There is nothing that says you absolutely have to use your real details when signing up for a website, so why should you unless it involves you receiving something tangible?
• Use unique email addresses when signing up for websites. One thing that I love about Gmail is that you can use what is called “plus-addressing”, where you can use one address and transform it into an unlimited number of email addresses simply by using the plus sign. For example, when I signed up at BUMPzee, I signed up using my regular email address and putting “+bz” on it ({username}+bz@gmail.com). This is useful to find out if a site is distributing email addresses to other groups.