Law Enforcement?

I have a guy who is expecting to pick up money tonight in Champaigne, Illinois. I checked and there are 4 locations that he can choose if I "send" him after 7:00. Should I contact law enforcement and try to have them intercept the guy?

Hi Hammer,

in a perfect world the answer would be "yes, of course the police will be sitting there waiting for this criminal to show", unfortunately our world is less than perfect and it would be very unusual for the police to actually follow this up let alone make an arrest.

I dont mean to sound like I am making excuses for the police but they simply dont have the resources required to follow up leads on every scammer they find out about.

It also makes it difficult that there is no victim yet, the law in most jurisdictions is that they can do nothing until there is a victim, that means you will need to be defrauded of money before they could act

I will also point out something that most people who deal with scammers already know and that is that scammers lie, just because he says he is turning up, it does not mean that he is.

Have you checked the IP address to find the location, if the IP is outside the US then there is practically no chance at all that your scammer will show

If he is picking up via a western union, moneygram, or other instant money transfer agent, then he can be anywhere in the world.

You can try to find out his approximate location by using the headers of any email he has sent you.

If you don't know how to find headers, follow the advice on this website - http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answ ... wer=22454#

When they appear, you should copy the lot and paste them in this website - http://headertool.apelord.com/headers.

If the scammer is using gmail, hushmail, or fastmail, then this technique won't work. Also, if you choose to post the header here, please delete all your details from it - your email address will be in there a few times.

Another thing to note is that if no money has changed hands, then there has been no fraud and the police can't legally do anything.