Photography

Be wary of text from anonymous clients who want to hire you sight-unseen

Before my move to a smartphone, I never knew I’d be subject to scams from crooks who strictly text.

Who hires someone without talking to them in person?

Apparently the scam artist will say he/she is hearing impaired so they get you to drop your guard because as a business owner you wouldn’t want to be perceived as prejudiced.

I usually dismiss texts from strangers or numbers I don’t recognize.

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Take a note of the phone number folks. I wish there was a way to locate the names of these scam artists so we could publicly shame them.Note, he never actually addresses me by name. So it means he is cutting and pasting from a script.

Since I wasn’t too busy doing anything critical I decided to play along.

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Red flag#2. I asked for the location of the event, did a quick search online and found that the house is on the market according to Zillow.

But it soon got  tiring after a while.

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The moment I mention i needed to meet in person, he disengaged the chat.

 

So I went online to see if I could figure out what might have happened if I had believed ‘James’.

Proabably this: he was going to use a stolen credit card number to pay me then he would intentionally overpay me and ask for a refund either by Western Union or some other form of payment which can’t be traced to him.

If any of you have other ideas of how else they might cheat you, please let me know via comments.
Peter Phun Photography

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