What Are Mystery Compensation, Funds Recovery And Overdue Payment Scams?

[Roxy]

When someone you don’t know contacts you via email and wants to send you a very large sum of money, it is obviously a scam. Many of these scams follow one of several standard email scam modalities, but sometimes scammers send emails that lack any context for the large sum of money they claim they want to send you.

In these types of scams that lack proper context, the scammer either fails to say where they are contacting you from, what company or organization they are associated with, by what means the payment is to be made, or from whom or why you are supposed to be the recipient of these so-called funds.

Cases where certain elements are missing from the scam email format leave these emails without the possibility of being placed into one of the specific scam email categories we have created on this website. Often the emails say that funds have been recovered for one vague reason or another and are due to be paid out to you. In these instances, the only thing we can ascertain is that the email is a typical advance-fee fraud scam, and thus we simply refer to them as “Mystery Compensation Scams,” “Funds Recovery Scams,” or, in some cases, “Overdue Payment” scams, even though no clear reason is given.

These types of scams are, in effect, no different from a typical advance-fee fraud email scam; however, in most typical advance-fee scams, the scammer will at least claim they are making contact on behalf of a bank, a government entity, a law firm, or a company wanting to do business with you. These emails do not, and the scammer does not specify how they are actually associated with their so-called offer. These types of scam emails often contain only a declared amount of money slated for payment with very little context, followed by a request for a smaller amount of money to be paid upfront to the scammer in order to receive the much larger sum.

Sometimes the scammers may also list a number of government agencies, claiming that certain agencies have already approved the supposed payment of funds to you, but still no clear reason is given for the payment being due to you, nor does the scammer claim to be affiliated with any of the agencies mentioned.

The scammer may also ask you to contact 2 or 3 other people during the course of the scam, claiming they are also involved with the transaction. This is a psychological technique designed to make the transaction seem more legitimate. In most cases, however, you are dealing with only one scammer who is acting behind all of the various fictitious personas being presented.

The scammer will eventually ask you to send money before any of the money being promised can be sent to you. This is a type of scam known as Advance-Fee Fraud, as already mentioned above. Advance-Fee Fraud is best described as an offer of money, merchandise, services, employment, or even romance, in which the victim is asked to pay a fee in advance to obtain whatever is being promised. The main strategy of all advance-fee fraud scams is to persuade the victim to send money, then continue to send more money to the scammer as many times as possible, until the victim eventually runs out of money and/or goes into debt as a result of losses from the scam. In the end, the victim never receives any of the money being promised.

Please click here to read more about the psychological techniques used to deceive people with Advance-Fee Fraud scams. The following article on Wikipedia also explains more about Advance-Fee Scams in general: Wikipedia Link