A Cautionary Tale
A couple of weeks ago I was contacted via email by a fellow in California. I'll call him Mr. X. He said he had seen this woven hanging on my website and wanted to purchase it for his new apartment. He wondered if it was still available. I said it was. He said that because he was about to move to England and his banking accounts were in the process of being changed, he would mail me a certified check, which I should deposit. He also said that his personal shipping agent would contact me and pick up the artwork and ship it. He requested that when I received his check, I should subtract the amount due for the wall hanging and send the remainder of the money to his shipper. I thought it was a peculiar arrangement, but I figured that if I waited until his check cleared before proceeding, I would be OK.
I did think it odd that Mr. X never inquired about the size of the hanging or the price, so I emailed him again with this information (the price was $700), and he said this was all satisfactory, and that I should contact him for further instructions when I received his check.
The check eventually arrived, it was for many thousands of dollars, and it was drawn on a nursing home in Denver. This was too weird! I emailed Mr. X and told him he had sent the wrong amount of money, and to please provide a phone number so I could call him and sort this out. Meanwhile, my mental alarm bells were going off, so I phoned the nursing home in Denver and asked why they had sent me a check for thousands of dollars with no letter or documentation. The nursing home director paused and asked, "Are you an artist?" I said yes. Then he said I was the seventh artist to call that day, and there were eight the previous day. It was a scam. Someone had hacked their checking account, and was sending forged checks to artists with the same request: to send money to his shipper. I told the director I would be happy to return the bogus check to him, along with copies of all the emails I had received from Mr. X, as he wanted to forward all this material to the fraud department of his bank, which had begun an investigation.
I thought that would be the end of that, but the next day I received another email from Mr. X, saying he really appreciated my honesty; he included instructions to go to any Western Union office with cash, and gave me the name and address of his "shipper" with instructions to send cash to same. And in great big capital letters he said LET ME KNOW THE BEST TIME AND DAY FOR THE PICK UP.
I ignored the message, but a few hours later I got yet another message from Mr. X, asking, "Just wondering if you got my last message."
In my family we have a word for this kind of behavior: chutzpah.