The emails from ‘scotty’ are appearing on every Celebrant network all over the country.
Yes it is a Scam!!
Sending out emails via yahoo, gmail and Hotmail so far.
It is the old ‘overpayment scam’ that has been running in the USA, Europe and UK for years but with Facebook and other forums, most celebrants in those regions recognise the scam immediately and so that area has largely closed to these criminals.
Australia was immune because of the NOIM and requirement to provide ID however the same does not apply to renewals and so Celebrants all the country are getting the ‘Scotty’ email.
Some Celebrants have reacted by enrolling him (or her) into every persistent, obscure and/or oddball subscription they could find. Scotty is doubtlessly getting hundreds of emails from porn sites, religious sites such as ‘a prayer a day’ and any & all politically radical sites that can be found. It seems he is currently being bombarded with spam
Others took the appropriate step of reporting the emails to scamwatch by Forwarding the unaltered emails to: report@submit.spam.acma.gov.au
The tactic is to overpay by Paypal, cheque or credit card and then ask the Celebrant to pay other vendors.
The other vendors are actually accounts Scotty owns and quickly closes after he has your money and just before he cancels his original transaction to you.
So far he has claimed to be a ‘local’ in every capital city in Australia, claims to be deaf and so can only communicate via email, has apparently given out addresses and venue names that are false, and writes that it a surprise for a son or nephew.
If you get an ID, bank account details or Venue account, or any other personal detail; forward immediately to scamwatch and/or police, after all it is a fraud.
Last year some celebrants in the UK and USA were scammed of $thousands!
