Playing The Float

While I have alluded to it several times before, I am dedicating this post to a common technique Jamaican criminals use to dupe Sweepstakes scam victims: Playing The Float.

The reason I am doing so is that many Advance Fee fraud victims send money to crooks believing that they have been sent money, by them.

It is all a con game, of course, and here's how it typically works:

1. The scammer calls the target, and tells them they have won millions in a sweepstakes or lottery.

2. The fraudster tells the target that a fee - such as a tax or customs duty - must be paid in advance, to collect the winnings.

3. If the victim balks, the caller offers to pay the fee by sending a check, portrayed as an advance on their winnings. The check is bad, of course, and the crooks do their best to make it seem legit by pretending it is from a major financial institution like Wachovia Bank, or Bank of America.

4. The target is instructed to deposit the check and immediately wire a portion of the proceeds to Jamaica, or a payment processor (money launderer) in the U.S.

Here is what the criminals know, that most scam victims don't know: If you have enough money in your account to cover a check, most banks will cash it before it clears. If the check bounces the disbursement is considered a loan, and the account holder is held responsible for paying it back.

The crooks know this all too well, and consequently use the float - the time it takes to see if a check is good or bad - to extract cash from the innocent. Using this tactic, criminals can buy anywhere from 24 hours to six days.

Playing the float is clearly a scam because:

• No legitimate sweepstakes or lottery, requires winners to pay fees in advance, to collect prizes.

• Sending checks in exchange for cash doesn't make sense, at least from the victim's point of view. Why can't the sender simply deduct the amount owed from the their winnings? Answer: Because there are no winnings. Amateurish though they are, the criminals can still do basic math: They know that zero dollars minus fifteen hundred bucks, equals nothing.
  

It is important to note that rubber checks don't come just from the crooks: Sometimes they come from other victims acting on the criminals' instructions.

And - as I have reported in previous blogs - the fraudsters try to play the float by making phony payments by phone, on victims' credit card accounts. Needless to say it is absurd for a stranger to pay your $9000 credit card bill, in exchange for $300 cash. I mean, if I offered you a thousand dollars in return for fifty, you would either think I was loony or there was a catch.

To competent adults, the catch in the "more-check-for-less-cash" ploy is obvious. To vulnerable seniors it is not so apparent, which is why we must do everything we can to protect them from scams and scammers.