Is this a scam ? How to find out ?

I am a freelance translator, and I have a professional profile on different plat-forms, such as TranslatorCafe. This person made a job pool offer. I received his first e-mail :

******
My name is Paul Carson, i am from South Carolina.
I recently retired as a document controller for Sempra Oil & Gas USA. My wife and i are coming to spend our retirement in France.
Currently, i am in search of a personal assistant to work with us virtually/remotely prior to our arrival in France.

Reliability is very important to us hence our choice for interpreters and translators.
We arrive Paris on the 20th September 2014 and we shall be in Paris for four weeks before finally moving to the south of France where we plan to spend the rest of our lives.

Your duties as our personal assistant would be to assist us in basically anything we are required to do prior to our arrival which may range from.

Planning trips.
Arranging Airport Pickups.
Pay bills.
Booking train tickets.
Vehicle Hire.
Vehicle Insurance
Organizing diaries.
Booking Hotels.
General assistant.


The candidate must be a good listener and friendly.
The candidate could be male or female and be of any race and age.

The wage we are offering is Four hundred euros per week.
This job is a part-time job because most of the task will be done at your spare time.

Full itinerary would be given to you as soon as all arrangements have been concluded.

After reading the above, if you are interested in this position please leave your full name, address and telephone number.

If you require more information, please feel free to contact me and i will be glad to respond almost immediately.


Please note that this email does not automatically offer you employment.
Only successful candidates will be contacted by telephone and email.
Your details would be verified before being accepted.

No prior experience in this field is necessary.


Best Regards,

Paul Carson
+1 864 697 8219
***************************

I received then a second email :


***************************
Hi Julien,

I have received your email stating your interest in this job and i am glad to let you know i am also interested in working with you.
As i stated in the earlier email,my arrival date is the 20th September 2014. Full itinerary would be passed on to you as soon as all arrangements have been concluded.
You are to work with me virtually at your spare time. Basically email to email prior to my arrival.
I would say preparing me for my Arrival in France and acting as my representative is the key statement.
Before i arrive, there are a couple of things that needs to be done which include.

Hotel reservation.
Travel Insurance.
Car rental.
Arrange pick up at the airport.


The travel insurance is handled by an Agent in the UK while the Hotel Reservation,arranging pick-up from the airport and the car rental will be sorted out by you.
Hence your primary duty would be to receive payments that will serve this purpose.
A check would be posted to you to enable you have funds for this. Checks from the USA don't work in the EU hence the check would be drawn from an European financial institution.

I will require you to create a folder which will contain every communication and every dealings. Which would be referred to when needed.

This will only happen after you sign the agreement attached within the context of this email and send me a valid photo ID.

I hope this is not much of a task?
Feel free to contact me for more information and i will be glad to respond almost immediately.
I hope to read from you soon.

Best Regards,

Paul Carson.

P.S Attached herewith is a scanned copy of my passport and a contractual agreement between both parties.

************

It does sound like a scam.. He sent a bad copy of his ID. The email headers are sent from an IP located in US.

How to be sure ?

Note: I opened several emails, opened fe attachment (doc and JPEG file) directly from the browser, without saving them.

Hi,

I'm new to posting here, long time lurker, first time poster!

anyway from what I have read about scams this is definitely a scam, sorry.

he wrote -
The travel insurance is handled by an Agent in the UK while the Hotel Reservation,arranging pick-up from the airport and the car rental will be sorted out by you.
Hence your primary duty would be to receive payments that will serve this purpose.
A check would be posted to you to enable you have funds for this. Checks from the USA don't work in the EU hence the check would be drawn from an European financial institution.

- this sounds like the dodgy check scam, they send you a fake check, you cash it and send them the funds, later on the bank realises it is fake and YOU are the one left with the cleanup bill, while the scammer is long gone.

also, the way he wrote is way to formal and doesn't fit in with the way people from America, even businessmen, write. for example, he writes "I recently retired as a document controller for Sempra Oil & Gas USA" and my question is HOW ON EARTH IS THAT RELEVANT, the name of the company he worked for??? a real person would write something like "I recently retired after working in the Oil and Gas industry for x amount of years". you question why he leaves the company name - to make it seem "legit" failing to realise that he is providing too much information, which is a tip off.

also, the poor punctuation throughout is at odds with what is supposed to be a formal work document/invite.

"My name is Paul Carson, i am from South Carolina" - NO genuine American businessman writes like that, way too stiff and formal. they would write something like "My name is Paul Carson, from South Carolina".

scammers write way too formally in an attempt to look legit, failing to realise that the fact that they don't use American slang/phrases/etc is a giveaway in itself/

Also, forgot to mention, one thing scammers, particularly from Africa, seem to have trouble with is word tense, they will writing in the present tense for something that should be written in the past tense.

doing it once is not a giveaway but read through enough emails from scammers and you see they regularly confuse tenses, writing in present tense for phrases that should be in past tense. it is cos they are not familiar enough with American Spelling.

read through this letter - they make this mistake. 100% scammer.

Right! This makes a lot of sense... something I hardly realize, since English isn't my native language. But I know what you mean.

When it's too good to be true, most likely is... Even though you want to believe this one might be the exception !

Damn scams !!

I am in North Carolina. There is very little difference between South Carolina English and North Carolina English, though people who have lived their whole lives in a rural area often have a different accent than people like me who lived most of their lives in cities and in other parts of America. The writer of those emails is not from South Carolina.

There is a big difference between English as spoken and written here and English as spoken and written in West Africa. The writer of those emails is African.

The "personal assistant" is a common title for scam jobs. It can involve forwarding money from fake checks, or using them to buy stuff and sending it to the scammer.

By the way, please don't point out the errors in the scammer's writing. Scammers do read this forum, and we don't want them improving their writing. Pointing out that it is African English is enough.

Paul Carson
+1 864 697 8219

Hence your primary duty would be to receive payments that will serve this purpose.
A check would be posted to you to enable you have funds for this. Checks from the USA don't work in the EU hence the check would be drawn from an European financial institution.

How to be sure ?

First of all, the phone # given is a VOIP #. That means its easily redirected anywhere in the world, no matter where its origin.
Area Code:864 Carrier:Bandwidth.com Full Number:1-864-697-8219 City/State:Joanna, SC

Next, "You will be receiving.." Is a statement telling you that you will either be cashing fake checks, or laundering stolen money aka money muling. See this article for more information about being a money mule : http://419advancefeefraud.blogspot.com/ ... -fake.html

The "false fact" that US checks will not work in the EU is pure BS to start with. World trade is extremely common these days. They even have an institution to make such transactions, they call it a "Bank". Its amazing things we have in this 21st century !!! If he is in the USA, and is sending you an EU (check) currency, how is he getting an EU currency?

It smells of week old fish that's been out in the sun if you ask me.

I have been communicating with a fellow who is supposedly in Nigeria, finding and extracting crude oil. He told me the other day that after he went to the bank, he was robbed and his money was taken. He was hit on the head and injured, he said that his bank told him they could not transfer money to the Nigerian Bank, he wanted me to allow them to transfer it into my bank account and then for me to send the money to him. I certainly did not want him to have my bank information, so I told him no, that I would not do that. I have tried to save some of his IM's to send to make sure he is a scammer. I know you need to see that information, but have been unable to get any lengthy ones. Grammar is bad, and uses phrases wrong. My gut says he is a scammer.

Am beginning to wonder if there are any real men out there. Have deleted all my profiles on dating sites, all I seem to find are duds, lol.

Yes, it is another scam. This time the scammer wants to use you as a money mule. He wants you to launder stolen money for him. The money sent to your bank account will be from other victims.

By the way, please don't point out the errors in the scammer's writing. Scammers do read this forum, and we don't want them improving their writing. Pointing out that it is African English is enough.

thanks, I won't do it again. I just wanted to point out the inconsistencies between the writing style from a supposed American. Next time I will just say "it is written in African English"

@ Julinhio

I ended up replying and submitting my resume etc to the so called "Paul Carson". I was ready to start and work for them, too. But after receiving a strange answer from them about the contract I decided to look up and see if it was indeed a scam.

Thank you for your post, because without it I would have probably cashed these fake checks.

Hi everyone,

I was myself as well contacted by this Mr. Carson this month and got exactly the same emails with the same text. Two friends who work at banks warned this should be outlines a starting strategy for money laundering. A search in the the net got my here!
I was glad with this opportunity. How I wished it would be true. From now on, these mails will be treated as pure spam.

Hello there!

I have received the same email via a well intentioned friend of mine. English is not my native language and everything seemed correct to me but my friend who is american told me that the way this guy writes is not how a real american would. We started to check the address given in his mail, the name and then his name and adress together and that how we found your website!
The thing is I should have done all this way before anything else. As I didn't want to delay too much my answer, after receiving the copy of his passport and the contract to be signed, I sent a copy of my ID and the signed contract: could you please tell me if he could do anything with these documents?
I am a bit scared now as I read people whose identity was stolen to buy things or to get credits!
Thank you in advance for your answer.
Best regards
p.d.: I was always the first one saying how can people can be caught by this kind of scam and here I am!

No. The scammer can't use a picture of your ID to open credit accounts or access yours and I can't think of anything he can do with so little information. The contract is just nonsense, not real. He just wanted to trick you into receiving bank transfers for him, then sending the money on to him by western union.