I hope you guys have seen this scam before. I have replied generally to this one because it also has my old piano teachers e-mail address attached to it.

Hello Friend,
My name is Wood Troy, I am 16 year old and I am interested in learning how to play Piano, Sax and Flute.i will like you to take me to a nice level, I am a beginner and I’ll like to know if you can afford two class a week? and how much is per hour lesson
I will like you to email me any other detail waiting to hear from you
Wood

1. who the hell names someone Wood Troy?
2. why is grammar so bad?
3. why does he want so much detail?
4. what kind of beginner student wants 2 classes a week?
5. notice how general the request is. Piano, sax and flute ensures that he will get a response from any teacher because of the diversity of the instruments.
6. This smells of a scam to me. I'm going to call my old piano teacher about this and I'm going to call this guy out.

Thoughts?

The "student" will send a cheque in too large an amount, or the right amount, but he will have some "unfortunate occurrence" forcing him to cancel the lessons. He will ask for a refund, but let you keep a bit of it for your kindness. A few weeks later the original cheque will bounced so that you have essentially paid him.

It is probably a Nigerian email scam artist. I send back emails to them requesting to stop by my studio IN PERSON and sign contracts and pay me at the time of the interview. They usually stop bothering you, if you get back at them first.

Yup, I had a Nigerian email to pay full price for a grand piano I was selling, no questions asked. I was to ship immediately upon receipt of a check from the buyer which would be $10,000 above my asking price, and immediately send back a check in the amount of $10,000 to the buyer. Yeah, ok, I'm on it. lol.

I too have recieved many requests for lessons with very poor grammar asking for lessons more than once a week or for a 3 month stint while they are visiting in the U.S. I have not bothered to reply as obviously they are not legitimate students and I didn't want to be caught holding the bag, or loosing the money as it were.

I usually just delete those emails but once, I decided to reply. I told them I charge $500 per hour, with a 2-hour minimum, two lessons weekly; total would be $8000 for the month. I wonder why I never heard back....

I just LOVE that! I always delete those emails but I just might use your reply. (still giggling!)

I'd be careful, though, because they might send you something with a virus or other crap that will mess up your computer.

Yes, and taking it further, I've been told that these scammers sometimes will take info. off your check (routing number and such) and then buy stuff on the internet with your account information. My bank warned me about this.

Which anyone can do, by the way. If they have your bank routing number and account number, they can directly withdraw funds from you account, no approval needed. This just happened to us by some guy in Nigeria supposedly enrolling at Florida Tech. Tried to take $19k total from us. We caught it right away, of course, and the bank refunded everything. Thing is, there's no way to say there will be no ACH withdrawals from your account. Isn't that dumb??

edit to add: For the record, we did not respond to any scam emails ;P

*Raises hand*


But can't you ask to pay by cash for the first lessons? Maybe a scammer won't waste money

Jesus, this thread is making me feel paranoid about giving parents my bsb and account number to pay fees directly into.

Genius, pure genius!!!

I like the idea of messing with a spammer's head.

If you write somebody a check, your bank routing number and account number is written on that check. So it's no big secret. Giving parents your bank routing and account number is probably no different than you writing them a check that has your bank numbers on it. Of course, fallen into the wrong hands, it may be a nuisance to fight it off with the bank.

how do these people who get our e-mail addresses know that we teach piano?
I mean its one thing to spam, its another to randomly email someone whos say...a golf instructor and scam them for golf lessons. How do they know what we do? There must be someone who is selling our e-mail addresses. what do you think? I don't mind giving out my e-mail address to prospective clients, but I don't sign up for anything non work related with it.

Have you taken a deeper look around these message boards? Unless you take specific steps to hide your email address, its in your profile, free for anyone to look at or for a script written by a programmer to glean and store for later use.

Google can crawl the site for information searches, so can others. The fact that you use this site is enough to clue people in to the fact that you relate to music (more specifically piano) in some way or another. On a large scale they are bound to get quite a number of positive hits against a generic sounding music related email. Think larger than just the PW forums and it becomes quite easy to see how they get the info.

Its a might bit scary if ya ask me,
RXB

Yeah, that's quality stuff. I knew a guy who hated telemarketers and used to mess with them mercilessly. One of my favorites was when they would ask for him by name, he would say, "no, he's not here, but do you know where I can find him? He moved out last week and owes me a lot of money. I'd sure like to get my hands on him... can I get your number so I can check every so often to see if you've found him... etc." He got a lot fewer calls as time went by

Hey Mitts_Off - have you thought about getting a second checking account to act as a financial "firewall"?

You can find no-fee checking accounts all over online these days, set one up for parents to deposit to, then you ACH transfer (again, find one with no fees for this!) to your main account.

This way, the damage someone can do by accessing your "public" account is limited. (They could get money out if they timed it right, just as parents were depositing, but not more than that. And they'd really need to time it right, since you withdraw the money regularly.)

I just got another fake e mail. Mr Johnny's son is coming over from England. Needs 3 monthes worth of lessons. Interesting from England and he can't speak correct english again. Will pay me extra for my trouble, no problem. Do they really think they will get takers on these things?