Is N.Z. going "third world"?

[HankMauel]

Just received the following email. Judging from the Queen's English, this should have come from Nigeria. I hope N.Z. is not going to be the next "third world" scam center...it's too nice a place for this to take root!
Anyone from the southern hemisphere get one of these or is he just prospecting "up north"?
Anyone recognize the address?


Email copy:

Hi, I want to place an order in your store,and i will like to know if you ship to New Zealand and my method of payment will be credit card.so please let me know if you can assist me with the order ,And please do not forget to include your web page in your replying back to my mail.I will await your prompt response as soon as you receive this mail,i will be very glad if you treat this email with good concern.

Best Regards
Larry Carter

Shipping Address:
Larry.Perfect store inc.
432 Beach Street,Queenstown Town Centre, Otago,
Zip Code :9300 ,New Zealand
Tel:+61 3 792 10 70

[Steve]

Man, it looks like Larry has wide and varying interests...http://www.taxidermy.net/forum/index.php?topic=240510.0. You don't sell stuffed animals too, do you Hank? You could really clean up here.

[HankMauel]

Hmmm...maybe I could ship him an Estaban guitar and tell him where to stuff it. Solve two problems at once!

[kiwinoz62]

the world is full of this type of scum. . . the only way they know how to earn a dollar is rip someone else off.

[liam_fnq]

So what's the process with this type of scam. I doubt they really want a guitar or stuffed and mounted duck. Do they pay with a dodgy credit card then ask for a cash refund or something?

[peter.coombe]

Delete.

I get this sort of stuff all the time. The delete button gets hit so fast I never noticed the address.

[Nick]

Weird, a quick Google maps search & Beach street doesn't go up as high as 432 (I didn't think it was that long a street!).
Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it) the government are encouraging overseas investment in New Zealand currently Hank & so a percentage of the population are of non english speaking origin. Some I've come across have lived here for ten years and still refuse to speak a word of english or if they can, it's a very small collection of only the essential words such as "dollar" "you give", they live in areas of their own nationality & so don't, in the normal course of events, have to relate to english speakers. When they come to the written word, it sounds like it's coming from the dark continent somewhere.
Mind you, due to the ever increasing use of spell checker's, computers e.t.c things like grammer & spelling have gone out the window anyway! I work in a university & some of our academics' spelling (sans spell check) & written grammer are atrocious as the emphasis shifts away from such things! It seems it's more important to get idea down on the page than how it is written on it. As an extension of this principle, children will now not have marks deducted from high school exam papers if the child has used 'text talk' in it! So u now hv a dumin dwn of t english langage pepul.kol

But this one certainly sounds scammy.

[HankMauel]

Yes, they "pay" with bogus credit cards. I had one from Nigeria ask me to take 4 Visa cards for $20K plus worth of orders. The fool picked the guitars off my website, expecting them to "be in stock". Just for fun I played him for about 6-8 weeks with one hell of a story. If you wish, I can copy it here or send it via email to those interested. It's a hoot!
And regarding English. We here in the "colonies" have nothing to brag about. As for school students, I have participated for the past 21 years as a "judge" for our local high school Senior Project program.
With all the spell checking etc, I have had ONE paper out of more than 130 over the years that did not have a spelling OR syntax error.
The most common student error...they're using the wrong there in their paper! Spell checker sails right past the correctly spelled word every time! I write notes on each evaluation about the need for proof reading the work by another disinterested party to catch just such errors...and that I would not accept this from anyone I employed on any project I assigned. In fact, I'd probably "show them the door" if they turned in something of that poor quality after all the work/research put into the project! I have also conveyed that to all their teachers/advisors, but it doesn't seem to take root and all the students "pass" the requirement.

Oh well...dumbing down seems epidemic.

[Dominic]

It seems these idiots do impact us all and is perhaps not as harmless as we think.

I ordered some EMG pickups last week from GPDUSA.COM and got an email on Friday saying I had been flagged by some faceless un-named body as a high risk of credit fraud. They wanted me to email a copy of my credit card and/or drivers licence. There is no way I am going to email copies of my ID around the world. I think that is financially irresponsible of them to ask.

They said my billing address and shipping address was probably wrong. I been at my current place for 5 years and I've used the same billing address/shipping address and credit card with them many times before. I even sent them a copy of the previous order. The funds have been debited from my account but remain pending, I assume I'll be charged for this either way.

Anyway, I understand that the credit check guys have to careful but it pisses me off that I could get caught up in something like this presumably because a few idiots using bogus addresses or stolen cards from this side of the world are trying to rip others off. I just makes it more expensive for everyone.

Cheers
Dom

[Puff]

The +61 prefix is Australia not New Zealand so does that make it a Skype number or some other service provider?
Whoever it is - the provider - has the option of getting rid of the offender if complaints of action are received.
The highest street number with a Beach Street web presence is 109 but the addy may be lacking punctuation in terms unit/street number.
http://perfect-store.com/ might give insight

[Nick]

The highest street number with a Beach Street web presence is 109 but the addy may be lacking punctuation in terms unit/street number.

Beach street (from what I can remember last time I was down there) is only about 4-500 meters long, so a street number in the 400's had me puzzled but 43 unit 2 could be possible but then if he is a legit business then he'd make sure the address was right.....Well you would assume he would. But the country code mistake is also a dead giveaway as you rightly pointed out.
Dominic, that was a shocker you are going through! Most places that have wanted to sight my card have asked for a faxed copy of it. Hope you get your problem sorted.

[Steve]

Not sure if you saw in my link, but the same message was being sent from Malta too. I don't think that there's much doubt that the address and phone number (not enough numbers) are dodgey. Here's a blurb from Wikipedia that seems quite plausible (& puts the poor old kiwis in the clear)...

In the Australian re-shipping scam, a company in the United States is contacted by a potential customer, stating they would like to place an order with the company. Once the company responds, verifying that the desired products are in stock, the fraudster will then ask for a shipping quotation to Australia, and explain that they will be paying via credit card.
Once the victim company sends the quotation to the fraudster, they reply that they will have their U.S. agent or freight representative come to the company's location and pick up the merchandise, and the agent will ship the goods to the "customer". The fraudster then asks the company to add a plausible additional charge of US$700 to US$1,500 onto the total cost, and pay that amount to the "agent" when they arrive to collect the goods. The scammer also offers additional compensation to the company, for the extra trouble of paying their agent. The offered reasons for this arrangement might be "the freight company only accepts cash", or "the agent is unable to process credit cards". If the victim company responds that this is not possible, the fraudster will cut off communication.
There are typically many grammar and spelling mistakes in the communications...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_fraud