Did you receive an email from George Taylor asking if you could do an escrow for his purchase of construction equipment? I did. Upon review I determined it was spam and promptly moved it to my junk email. The hallmarks of it being a scam were prevalent in the email if you were looking. For example, George said he found my company in the “course of [his] research.” I do not run an escrow company, so if he had actually researched our firm he would have seen very quickly that we were not in the business of escrowing construction equipment. The terminology used also suggested this was not a legitimate transaction. At one point he refers to a “crane” as the item being escrow, but later he says the funds are to be released when the terms and conditions for the “machines.” This failure to use the proper terms of art and changing from singular to plural were both further indicators that this was an attempted fraud.
Unfortunately, I was not the only person on my staff to get this email. Indeed, my assistant got the email and had spoken and emailed with him before I could cut off the communications. It hadn’t occurred to me to warn my staff of the scam email. Moreover, as an attorney for escrow companies, I didn’t think about advising them of the risk. But, in hindsight I wish I had. You see, later in the day we got an email from a client who had gotten the same email from George. It was in the email chain to us and our client was considering taking the escrow. Yikes.
The fact of the matter is that heavy equipment escrow scams are all too common. A simple google search will reveal this all to real fact. For example, Machine Trader’s website has a page dedicated just to warning people of such scams at
https://www.machinerytrader.com/info/scam
. The fact of the matter is that bad guys want our money and have no qualms about lying, cheating and stealing to get it.
How often do good things come unsolicited. It’s rare. So, any inquiry that is not the result of a referral or advertisement should be suspect. Assume it’s a fraud unless further verification can substantiate the claim. And be careful calling and or emailing. Once you’ve opened the lines of communication you have opened yourself up to further targeting. Since my staff emailed with the bad guy we had to reset her password and notify our IT department to see if the emails had resulted in George infiltrating our network. Luckily our systems had not been penetrated. Notwithstanding, it was a learning experience for my staff and myself. By way of this note, we hope you are warned as well and can avoid such scams yourself.
