Find Your Flower Shop Network has received several reports of a new twist to an old scam.
In the old scam, florists received a call through the hearing impaired service from a caller wanting to order several $200 wedding arrangements. The caller was willing to pay a large sum of money for the flowers using a credit card. The caller would have a courier service pick up the flowers. The catch – they wanted the florist to charge the credit card and give the courier service cash.
The new scam is basically the same scenario, but the contact is made through email.
All florists should be aware of this scam and be wary of any order that sounds to good to be true.
Here is an example of the scam email we received.
thank you for your quick response to my email,The favor is that i have not
pay for the Carrier that will come for the pick up, so i will like you to
include an extra $950 plus the total price of the order so that you can
have
all charge on my credit card now and you will have the $950 send to the
carrier via money gram or via western union money transfer ,so that
i can get you with my credit card for you to charge the amount and can i
have the grand to total cost now and i should have pay the Carrier charge
at
the first place but they don’t accept credit card as a method of payment
that is the reason why i want you to help me out with this and you are to
charge all the expenses and the money gram or via western union money
transfer charge from my credit card okay.
I will be wating for your response soon .
Best Regard
I just received one of these scam e-mails today!, wanting 7 large $250.00 arrgs, for his sons wedding, and said a private courier would be picking them up.
He went on to wanting me to e-mail him back so he could give me the credit card information.
He signed it Mark Fish.
Half of the words were spelled incorrectly and the grammer is bad, usually these people are in Nigeria or someplace like that, and apparently their English isnt the best.
Anyhow, I just hit the delete button!