MTFCA Forum

Has anyone else been contacted by Gilbert Arnold?
I requested a check from him for $240 for parts and he claimed his secretary made a mistake and sent me a check for $2,800 from a company in Illinois. I called and talked to the owner of company in Illinois and he said someone tried to cash a check last week for $4,000. Needless to say I did not cash the check and he repeatedly said the check was good and he is not a scammer. I sent the owner of the company that the check was issued form all the emails and hopefully they can catch this guy.

Good for you doing that! Definitely a scam

It seems they are everywhere. Last week I reported this scam to the FBI.

I hope the feds will track down these guys and ruin their day.

The sad thing on these scams is that they wents from trying to steal thousands of dollrs to now just hoping to get a few hundred and make it up on volume. I had one the other day that actualy tried to use fake postage on his fake cashiers check and the USPS intercepted it enroute. It's a minefield out there.

If you suspect a scam, do not open it even out of curiosity. That is what they are hoping you will do so they can gain access to your computer. If you do, it is like opening your front door and inviting in a stranger and allowing him full access to your house to do or take whatever he wants. Delete it immediately, just like you would hang up on and block a scam phone call before hearing the whole pitch. Jim Patrick

If you want to avoid getting scammed don't included you phone number or email address in your posting. That is scammer candy. It not necessary to be a MTFCA member to do a simple search across all postings to get a hit on members using a popular email provider like yahoo, gmail and even outlook.

So if you want to minimize your exposure, request that the member send you an email via MTFCA or reply to the posting. Both these methods require the person to be a member. If they just reply to the posting (no email) you can send them an email and converse via email.

So here's how simple it is to find scammer candidates. Unless you go and edit every one of your posting to remove email addresses etc they will persist indefinitely. Even trying to disguise them with some encrypted method still leaves you exposed.
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Notice the number of hits, lots of replication no doubt. --
To respond to a posting. You must be logged in. Click on Post Reply and follow-up with sending an email. To send an email (PM's are not always desirable by members) , just click on the user name. The click on send email to member name . Fill in the returned screen & submit it.
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The recipient will get an email from MTFCA as shown below. I sent one to myself. Its already setup to reply back to the sender outside of MTFCA mail.
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