Recently I was unknowingly involved in an email scam. I had been communicating with a buyer via email about a land purchase. Then, one day I received a call from the buyer's partner wanting to know why I had not been responding to the buyer's emails. I told the partner that I had been having ongoing email conversations with the buyer so I didn't know what he was talking about. I called the buyer and, after some discussion, we learned that there was a middle man intercepting our emails. A con artist had changed the buyer's email address by adding the number one (1) within the email address. This was such a sublte change to the email address that I didn't even notice it. The con artist modified my email address and inserted a period (.) in the middle of my name to pretend that he was me. During this process, the con artist was communicating with the buyer asking for funds to be deposited into an account. Luckily, we found out what was going on before and real damage was done.
Just prior to this, the buyer had visited another country and someone there hacked into his email account. In that case, one of his associates was conned into depositing several thousand dollars into a bogus account and the money was lost. So, be alert since this can happen to any of us... and in very subtle ways.
I reported this incident to the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (www.ic3.gov). Let's hope these guys will be caught and prosecuted!
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