Scam

If this has been discussed here, sorry for the re-post. I’m not a big poster here.

Got an internachi lead in my email yesterday from "“Corrinna Strausbaugh” asking for a quote with very little info on the home. I asked for more info and they only gave me the sq ft. Asked again for more info and they gave me an address. I googled the address and it does exist and is close to me and it is for sale.

They asked me to take a credit card for more than the inspection price and want me to give the difference to “the care taker”. Something smelled fishy. I asked for the caretaker’s, home owner’s and Agents name, address and phone numbers… that ended the conversation.

I called another local inspector on the other side of Baltimore who mentioned he was following up an internachi lead. I thought that was odd, two internachi leads in the same day when I have only seen one in a year.

Anyway, he got the same email from the same “Corinna Strausbaugh” and a home for sale near him about 40 miles north of here. He’s still stringing “Corinna” along. He’s trying to see can get the credit card number and check if the credit card is stolen. I don’t think there’s a credit card. I think they’re trying to gain enough trust to ask for a bank account number.

If ya’ll know about this, great. If you didn’t, you do now.

Neil

Be careful with these, I had a very similar situation with a guy about a year ago. He was very vague with the details and it took several emails back and forth just to get bare-bones info from this guy. After a couple days and about a dozen emails, he asked if he could pay me with a credit card for my fee and a couple **THOUSAND **extra dollars if I would be willing to wire money from my account on his behalf for his closing costs due to an immobilizing illness he was suffering… Needless to say I didn’t do that inspection. The even scarier part is about a week after dealing with his emails, I had two fraud alerts on two of my credit cards (both of which are managed on my computer with saved passwords, the same computer I did these emails on). It turned out it was a fraud attempt at my bank account and also a phishing scam that attempted to access my sensitive info on my computer. This guy went for a twofer, he didn’t win though.

Bottom line, we unfortunately live in an age of scammers and I think sometime there are more dishonest people than well-to-do ones wandering out there needing our services. One thing that I should have noticed is the names and emails never jive (example: Jason Smith [rongotcha.syke@dupednet.com]).-X Spam it and move on. Even if it was legit, it’s not worth your time and money to beg people for basic info needed to perform an inspection.

Hope this helps, good luck!

I have had the same person with the same email requesting the same thing and many others wanting to pay large sums of money and have me pay homeowners, landlords, caretakers etc… I would love to bust these people.

This is why it’s a good idea to reads this forum frequently.

Because this scam is prevalent and has been discussed often.