18 Aug 2024 - AJ
Scammers have been around for a long time. There are shady merchants in stories for a reason.
The oldest-known complaint letter is about 3770+ years old, to a merchant named Ea-Nasir (sometimes transliterated as Ea-nāṣir) about copper of really awful quality. I was reading about him recently, and that reminded me of a slightly more recent scam than his.
The Toner scam that I added today seems to trace back to the 1970s - though it could have been earlier if you count general office supply scams. I learned about it as a newly minted employee at my first professional job in the 1990s, and there are still Reddit posts and blogs and youtube uploads about the issue into the 2010s and 2020s.
This is not the only fake invoice scam out there; I’ve already talked about two of them - the Unpurchased Purchases Refund Scam, where the goal isn’t to get you to pay but to call the number provided in a panic, and the second part of the AR Aging Report where the scammer sends an “updated” past-due invoice with their bank info. Occasionally, scammers will send out invoices that seem to be from legit companies with the scammer’s bank info as well. There’s also the only slightly less scammy ads that look exactly like an invoice… except for the tiny line at the bottom stating it’s an ad.
But in this case, the scam involves social engineering to find out information, and then using that information to bill for nonexistent, unrequested, or misrepresented items.