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That's a well-known scam. At least I hope it's well-known. Frequently the scammers pretend to buy horses or horse trailers with fake checks.

There used to be a woman who had a web site called bustedupcowgirl.com who reversed scammed them, but she seems to have dropped offline. Her stories were hilarious.

- Jim

marktx wrote:I don't think there's anyone else to blame but the victim. This guy must have had money coming out of his ears to do that.

I have no idea what you are trying to communicate.

- Jim

"Joe" was no-billed this week for lack of evidence.

- Jim

Captain Matt wrote:It's nearly impossible to work legally without a SSN, ...

That doesn't stop a lot of people from doing it.

Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, was a good illustration of how to do this, if someone wants to try. He rode a bicycle. He lived in a shack on public property. He worked odd jobs in exchange for goods rather than money. He spent about a dozen years living that way.

It isn't the way I want to live. For one thing, I value health insurance.

- Jim

I don't think you can get off the grid and have a normal upper-middle-class lifestyle. If you own property, you have to pay taxes, and the IRS can demand to know where you got the money to do so. You also can't pay more than $10,000 for anything without getting a knock on your door. Merely possessing more than $10,000 cash make you presumed to be a criminal. Plus, any sizeable batch of bills is going to have some traces of drugs on it.

Gold is really inconvenient. A gold coin the size of a nickel (1/4 ounce) is worth over $200. How do you make change?

You're pretty much limited to subsistence farming and barter if you want to avoid problems with cash.

Of course you know the prophecy in Revelation of everyone having to be tattooed with the number of the beast so that they could buy or sell. That could realistically be done with microchips now. I don't think that is going to happen in the U.S. in the foreseeable future, but it's something to think about.

- Jim

I'm disappointed with this blame-the-victim mentality.

Maybe I didn't make this clear: "Joe" did not gain anything from this episode. He didn't keep any of the money, and he didn't lose any of his own.

Maybe some of you too smart to get involved in something like this, but some of us need to be reminded periodically.

- Jim

You are right, and I learned that the hard way myself. The problem is that most of us have a quality called empathy. We want to help people and we are willing to accept their version of events. For example, many people blame their money problems on a bitter divorce or long-term unemployment, both of which are real phenomena these days.

- Jim

He wasn't a large contractor. He was supposedly working on three or four jobs at a time. That is not unusual around here (remember, half the city is under construction).

Quite a few people don't have bank accounts. Most of the time, it's because they have such a bad credit history that no bank will let them open an account. If they owe money to the government, and they open a bank account, the government will seize it. (Then there are illegal immigrants who don't have valid IDs, but that was not the case here.)

As I mentioned earlier, I have been scammed small-time by "friends" and relatives. They come to you with a hard-to-believe sob story, but you're in a tight spot where you either have to lend them money or tell them they're a liar and end the relationship.

- Jim

I would like to think that if someone offered me a 25% annual return on an investment, I would know better. But if you read interviews with people who fell for these schemes, you can see how they work. The scam artist initially gets some people into the scam who have credibility in the community and a large audience. Smaller-scale scam artists often put pastors into that role. That person then draws in other people who think he is acting in good faith (which he is, in his own mind).

Madoff succeeded by duping some well-known investment advisers and other prominent people.

- Jim

Excaliber wrote:Joe was either extraordinarily gullible or he knew more than he professes to at this point.

I don't know about extraordinarily gullible. Some people go out of their way to please others. I used to have that tendency, but I was cured of it without getting in this much trouble.

Look how many supposedly smart people Bernie Madoff ripped off. He is only the latest and biggest scam artist.

Otis had credible explanations about why he was getting these large checks. He was a construction contractor and supposedly paying his suppliers and subcontractors. The problem was that he would take the initial payment, do a token amount of work, and then stop.

- Jim

This actually happened to someone that I know last week. Names have been changed to protect the innocent.

"Otis" asked his friend "Joe" to deposit a check to Joe's bank account and write checks to several other people. The amounts were in the thousands of dollars. Otis had a song and dance about why he didn't have a bank account, and he didn't want to pay the fees at a check-cashing place. Joe did what Otis asked.

This kind of transaction was repeated a couple of times.

Joe, much to his surprise, got a visit from the police, who arrested him for felony theft. Otis had been running a scam.

Now Joe has to hire a lawyer and try to prove that he did not know what was going on and he did not profit from these dealings.

I try to be prudent, cautious, paranoid, or whatever; but I never imagined this kind of hazard.

- Jim