Recently, multiple suspicious user accounts were created on Less Wrong. These accounts don't post any content in the forum. Instead, they are used only to send private messages to the existing users.
Many users have received a copy of the same message, but different variants exist, too. Here are the examples I know about. If you have received a different variant, please post it in a comment below this article:
Hi good day. My boss is interested on donating to MIRI's project and he is wondering if he could send money through you and you donate to miri through your company and thus accelertaing the value created. He wants to use "match donations" as a way of donating thats why he is looking for people in companies like you. I want to discuss more about this so if you could see this message please give me a reply. Thank you!
I don't know yet about anyone who replied and got scammed, so this is all based on indirect evidence. If you got scammed, please tell me. If you are ashamed, I can publish your story anonymously. Your story could help other potential victims.
Most likely, the scheme is the following:
- The scammer will send you money.
- Then they will ask some of the money back because they changed their mind, or they mistakenly sent you more than they wanted, or their financial situation suddenly changed, or whatever.
- After receiving the money from you, they will flag the original transaction as a fraud, so they get back the money they originally sent you, plus the money you sent them back. Then they disappear, or it will turn out they used a stolen identity, etc.
(Thanks to
If you replied to the original message and now you are already in the middle of the process, please inform your bank as soon as possible! Even if the step 2 didn't happen yet, so you can still get out without losing money, warning your bank about the scammer could help other potential victims.
Warning: If you have already received a check or a payment confirmation, and someone is asking you to send the overpayment back quickly, do not send anything. The check or the payment confirmation is fake, and the goal is to make you send money before you find out. (Thanks to
I apologize if I wronged you, but if you are honest, please act publicly, especially when it includes asking members to participate in financial transactions.
Money is no taboo here. MIRI asks for money publicly by posting an article (December 2015, August 2015, ...). Members post articles with financial advice (Twenty basic rules for intelligent money management, Financial Effectiveness Repository, A Guide to Rational Investing, and many debates in the regular Open Threads). According to our recent survey, 71 members work in "Finance/Economics" and 38 work in "Law"; and although some of them specialize in things irrelevant to your proposal, most likely a few could provide a valuable feedback, maybe even a warning of what could possibly go wrong.
It is your insisting to work behind the courtains that seems fishy to me. You try to make the recipients of your messages feel special, yet you and your associate copy/paste the same messages to multiple people. If your goal is to provide free education, you could have posted the first lesson publicly. If you don't want to be public with your name or with the name of your company, just create a pseudonymous account called e.g. "JumpingSquirrel2016" and refer to your company as e.g. "CompanyX". Even if your goal is to find two or three people to cooperate with privately in the future, you can still advertise your skills by posting one free lesson publicly. People who are experts in some area don't have to keep all their knowledge secret; there is usually at least 90% of the information known to enough people, sometimes even taught at universities.
For now, it seems like your priority is to send money through someone else, because reasons ("accelerating the value created"). Everything else seems like a cover story to make people cooperate. I suspect that the promised free education is also supposed to only happen after the person participated in the transaction.
If you are fake, your likely next step would be to send someone a fake check or fake "payment confirmation", and then use social engineering and time pressure to make them send a part of the money back to you before they can verify that they actually received the money. Which is much easier to do in private, even with dozen people in parallel. Would be more difficult to achieve when communicating with all people publicly, especially if they were warned about this option in advance.
So my advice, if you are serious, is to post a message in an Open Thread (it could be strategical to wait two days until someone creates "Open Thread March 7 - March 13, 2016" in the "Discussion" section) describing why exactly do you need to send money through someone else, and describe the specific steps in this transaction. Specifically, promising to never ask people to send you back the money (either all or a part) and not to use time pressure until they have fully verified that they have actually received the money. For the sake of transparency, you should publish the names of specific users and the amount of money sent through them, and they should verify it using their own accounts.
Meanwhile, feel free to publish any free education in the current Open Thread or in the next one.
"act publicly, especially when it includes asking members to participate in financial transactions." why should i ask publicly when asking personal questions about personal decisions?
"It is your insisting to work behind the courtains that seems fishy to me. You try to make the recipients of your messages feel special, yet you and your associate copy/paste the same messages to multiple people." im insisting to work behind the curtains? when did i insist, and why should i ask publicly? so i could copy my message and try to find some suita... (read more)