Would You Do Business With This British Businessman?

“Hi there, I am a brithsh businessman and I contact you for a business proposal. I want to to be my co-worker. You are able to be my co-worker and get 10% out of all my transactions only if you have an active paypal account and you are verified and able to receive paypay payments. I will never require your paypal account password as you probably think right now, I will only required your paypal e-mail address and a request payment like from you. If you show interest in my business proposal and desire to be my co-worker please contact me at bsns.partner@yahoo.com. Once again, my email address is as provided up front. I am very sorry that I contact you like this but this is great oportunity for both of us to make more money and live better. Waiting for your fastest reply if interested. Thank you for your time and interest!”

Today I received two emails from one posing as Katrina Colin who is using a blackhole ip address to mask his true location. You should be able to reach him / her at bsns.partner@yahoo.com. Would you do business with him?

No one in sane mind would. What gives him away?

1. Would you expect such poor english from a real British businessman?
2. Why can’t he receive email at the address he is writing from?
3. Which real business would provide a yahoo address?
4. Which real business wouldn’t provide his company name?
5. Why would any real business hide behind blackhole ip address?

Most spammers & scammers wouldn’t give you this many clues. Even one of them should make you very hesitant to move forward with such proposals. He is looking for a verified PayPal address holder who requests a payment from your PayPal account to his. This, very likely, gives him enhanced privilege to receive money from his scams.

Any business proposal in the real world has to be considered very carefully. In online world you have to be doubly careful as you cannot easily verify the identity of the person nor will you be able to easily track him down or bring him to justice in case of wrongdoing. He may be in a different continent & country (like Nigeria) where your laws don’t mean much and cannot be enforced.

Does that mean you shouldn’t conduct business in the online world?
On the contrary, you should definitely leverage the business opportunities in the online world. Internet makes it very easy to conduct business in a global market. However you should take some precautions.

You should always do business with people and organizations you can trust, sources whose identities are easily found and verifiable, who has been online for a long time, have verifiable reputation etc. All of these is easy to say. But how do you find them with online businesses? In the next article I will discuss ways to verify online businesses before you send them any of you hard-earned money.