Fraud Alert

Unfortunately fraudsters are contacting house sitter members with
fraudulent proposals.

The foreign fraudsters offer to pay salaries for house/pet sitting. They send fake, but convincing looking money orders/ checks /cheques for around 5,000.00

The fraudsters usually say they are outside your country of origin. Recent ones say UK and Canada and need to settle a debt in your country.

They ask the victim to immediately deposit the money, keeping 1500.00 for themselves and forwarding the balance to settle a debt in the victims country.

They become more and more frantic with their email follow-ups.

Many of the fraudsters use a Yahoo email address.
Please immediately forward the entire email including headers to abuse@yahoo.com
If they are registered with us please report through the feedback form and
we will take action. We scutinize the registrations but sometimes they only
become apparent when they start their communciations.

The spirit of Housecarers.com is rent free accommodation in exchange for house sitting. View all direct emails offering up-front salaries and payment with suspicion.

Many legitimate homeowners don't register with us. We give you the option of displaying your email link to allow homeowners to contact you directly. Many homeowners simply want to contact directly those who interest them and dont wish to register. Just look out for the fraudsters.

The fraudsters wont give you a phone number - as they are hiding behind their anonymity. You should be able to phone a legitimate home owner.

All housesitter email links are encrypted to prevent harvesting by spambots. However scammers can still manually send an email. However they will soon give up - due to the effort required to email directly - and the zero returns they will get from
our aware members.

We cooperate fully with law enforcement in all countries. If we work together we can
soon put an end to their sick game.

Fortunately none of our members have reported being victims - though one came close.

Here is a variation on the fraud above - where a fraudster posts attractive photos of a too good to be true arrangement, including offers of payment for housesitting in cities such as London

Variation on Fraud

4 comments:

hartmutnz said...

Hi Ian
Thank you for your article re spammers and scam artists. This is a worldwide problem that needs to be addressed and you have done everyone a good service publicising this. Eevryone needs to be aware that the internet is mis-used by some hardened criminals

hartmutnz said...

Hi Ian
Thank you for your article re. spammers and scam artists. This is a worldwide problem that needs to be addressed and you have done everyone a good service publicising this. Everyone needs to be aware that the internet is mis-used by some hardened criminals. There are some good sites out there that inform about these scams. View: www.sec-com.govt.nz/ for international and NZ fraud alerts.
You can, as a target of a scam artist do this: If you suspect a scam, IGNORE the email. This way the scam artist will not know that your email is valid and stop sending you more tries, and also prevents the scamster to pass on your email to other "partners", as often happens.
In general, DON't participate in these get quich rich schemes, as there is a dark side to each of them. If a large amount of money is handed out, it has been stolen from someone else, that someone else could have been YOU. So, stay aware, alert and use a commonsense ethical attitude and you will be fine :-)
Mr Prosale
Feel free to visit my own blog:
http://mrprosale.blogspot.com/

joy said...

mr prosale,

hello, i am a recent victim of scam artists, unlucky me, ihave sent 350 pounds already before investigating as i must admit the offer of working for a a family in the uk was quite believable and tempting. The amount was said to be used as a processing fee for the work permit in the Uk. after sending money the agency given by the supposedly employer asked for 300 more for anti-terrorist certificate which now strongly raised my suspicions. I asked the employer to help me with the fee for which he said he had already taken care of. Now, Ihave spoken w/ the agent who initially emailed me the british family profile and he said he is actually the employer. it is for this reason that i am writing to ask for help in stopping these crimes online.

Ian White, Housecarers said...

Joy

Please go to Me Prosales blog above to ask him. If something sounds too good to be true it probably is. Report your problem to the police.

regards
Ian